Partnerships to Advance the Conservation of Millions of Rainforest Acres

• ACT and the Skoll Foundation announced the launch of a long-term, multi-stakeholder project to create biocultural conservation corridors to enable indigenous communities to prevent deforestation across 114 million acres in the Amazon Basin.
• In Suriname, with representation of all 10 national tribes and government agencies as well as the participation of international experts, ACT co-organized a first national pan-stakeholder conference on land rights and demarcation.  An action plan timeline toward demarcation was produced, and as a follow-up, ACT was invited as the only NGO to sit with a government team to prepare the process for land rights mediation.  
• ACT continues to collaborate with the Surui indigenous people of the central Amazon to help them protect their 612,000-acre reserve and move their groundbreaking Carbon Project forward.  In 2011, ACT sponsored monitoring expeditions to allow the Surui to detect and respond to threats in and around the reserve; during these expeditions, the Surui identified renewed illegal logging not far from one of their villages and brought this activity to a halt.  
• In Suriname, ACT provides continuous training and assistance to the work of indigenous park guards who have graduated from the ACT-designed national indigenous park guard training course and are now active in the four remote interior rainforest villages.  ACT led the guards in water and soil quality testing, sponsored computer training, produced training manuals in three languages, and constructed guard posts.

Empowering and Strengthening Sustainable Indigenous Communities

• In the Colombian Amazon, ACT provides ongoing technical assistance, onsite oversight and training in sustainable agriculture for five indigenous tribes and farming communities located in and around the borderlands of the Alto Fragua Indi Wasi National Park, with a focus on cacao agroforestry plots, organic gardens, plant nurseries and seed banks.  ACT now is assisting the cacao farmers to enter discussions with brokers for the European chocolate market.  Overall, for over 1,500 indigenous leaders and local farm promoters of the Caquetá, ACT provided 90 workshops on sustainable production systems and biodiversity restoration and protection strategies.
• In Suriname, in the remote villages of Kwamalasamutu, Tepu and Sipaliwini, ACT continues to provide traditional schooling led by tribal elder and shamans.  Also, with ACT’s assistance, for the first time in the community’s history, 17 indigenous children of the community of Apetina took part in the state’s primary school final exams.
• In the Colombian Amazon, at the ACT-supported Yachaicurí Ethno-Education School, the students learn first-hand the sustainable farming techniques that allow them to grow their own food, contribute to the food resources of surrounding communities, and provide an economic base for their institution.  ACT has enabled the Inga community to receive public financial resources to continue providing intercultural education that perpetuates their ancestral cultural knowledge while teaching technical world skills.

Preserving and Promoting Tribal Culture and Knowledge

• In the Colombian Amazon, ACT supported the first combined gathering of two longstanding unions of healers’ associations—a union of men and a union of women, both formed with ACT sponsorship—convening 74 elderly healers and their apprentices from the reserves of five tribes.  The healers addressed issues of concern to both groups, including traditional land management, medicinal plant cultivation, ancestral agriculture, food security, sustainable income generation, and an emergency fund for elderly women.  ACT continues to fund the maintenance of the women healers’ meeting center and its adjoining aquaculture and poultry farms and organic gardens while providing technical training.  This support strengthens the health and traditional basis of at least 350 indigenous families. 
• In Colombia, ACT held meetings with the national parks service, the interior ministry, and administrators of the two-million-acre Río Puré National Park to begin defining a policy for the protection of indigenous groups in voluntary isolation in the Park area.  Thanks in part to ACT’s work, a paragraph was included in the National Development Plan specifying the need to develop a public policy for the protection of such groups.