By Lina Villa-Cordoba | Executive Director
In 1997, a group of youngsters and their relatives created the Amigos del Chocó Foundation, with the hope of promoting nationally and worldwide a region of great natural and cultural wealth. They placed their bet on a local development leveraged on the sustainable use of natural resources, and one in which communities would play starring roles.
This proposal was materialized in productive programs like those of Green Gold and Analog Forestry, processes that are accompanied by strategies of environmental communication and education and skill building, always with a vision of sustainability and local empowerment.
Our purpose has been to have a bearing on the local reality while we launch the Biogeographical Chocó across the national and international scenarios. Asocasan, Cocomacoiro, Fundamojarras and the Existir Foundation have placed their bets on constructing with us alternatives for development with dignity for Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific region. In Colombia we have become articulated with social, public and private organizations to advance in the fulfillment of our mission. Likewise, active participation in global networks has allowed us to articulate local communities and their products and processes with global dynamics and markets.
As this report reflects, 2006 was a year of programmatic and institutional strengthening. In the programmatic field, our efforts concentrated in finetuning the conceptual coherence or our work and advancing in the tracking, monitoring and impact-measurement processes. Concerning our institutional challenges, Amichocó demonstrated that it has constructed an institutional identity that nourishes itself from individual leaderships, but that transcends into a civil society proposal. We have now embarked upon a serious growing and maturing process.
We welcome 2007 with clear strategies and a competent human team that is committed to contributing to the development of the Biogeographical Chocó. This is the commitment that we assume towards the Pacific region communities, our allies and donors, and with the overall society. We expect to spread thought contagion to each time more communities, persons and institutions in a common bet for a region that we ought to be sensitive to as Colombians and inhabitants of a world threatened by social exclusion and environmental devastation.
Please click below to read the full annual report from Fundación Amigos del Chocó!
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