This year, a powerful new initiative was launched to strengthen indigenous leadership in the Amazon. The Amazonian Leadership School provides educational workshops to indigenous people, especially young men and women, with a focus on current issues in their communities and territories, such as extractive industries, collective and human rights, laws affecting the lives of the indigenous peoples, communications, and climate change. Workshops are held multiple times during the year for members of the Cross-Border Network and other indigenous representative organizations of the Amazon, and consist in discussion and reflection with the end goal of strengthening processes of autonomous governance, territorial defense, and self-determination. Materials such as PowerPoint presentations, videos, radio programs and texts are used to facilitate the experiences and to deepen the understanding of the themes.
The Amazonian Leadership School in conjunction with the Cross-Border Network have held four workshops so far this year, including: one in Sucua, Ecuador in February on Collective Rights and Radio Communications; one in May in Tena, Ecuador on Legal Projects that Affect Indigenous Territories; another in Tena in June that dealt with themes of Extractive Activities and Written Communications; and one in Iquitos, Peru in August about Collective Rights, Extractive Activities, and Communications. Indigenous representatives and leaders from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru attended each workshop. They then returned to their countries and communities to share what they had learned.
These two initiatives, the Cross-Border Network and the Amazonian Leadership School, have provided technical capacity-building to around 120 indigenous peoples in 2010, an amount that is likely to increase in the coming years given the interest in the themes and capacities developed already demonstrated by the participating nationalities and their representative organizations.
