Since the second semester of 2016, the Center for the Development of the Amazonian Indigenous (CEDIA) has been conducting strengthening workshops on community management and management in the San Mateo, Saasa, Nueva Palestina, Nueva Betania and Sol del Oriente native communities in Ucayali. In the months of February and March of this year, the participatory work to modify and approve the statutes, as well as the election of boards of directors, began.
The strengthening workshops are structured in two stages. The first corresponds to the internal and external aspects of a native community; that is, how it is structured, administered and self-governed; and recognize the public entities with which it relates and can relate in its daily life to establish alliances based on its needs and its benefit with a vision of sustainability.
In the second stage, management aspects related to life in the community are worked on, such as modifying and updating community statutes. CEDIA and the communities have identified that there is limited knowledge on the part of the populations about these management instruments and gaps in them, agreeing to hold, with the general assemblies of the communities, a workshop to evaluate and modify the communal statutes. Once approved by the community, the respective documentation is presented to the National Superintendency of Public Registries (SUNARP) to obtain the registration of the Statute.
The Nueva Betania native community has already registered the modification of its Statute in SUNARP and it is published. The native communities Nueva Palestina, Saasa and San Mateo already have their Statute approved and are in the process of being registered in public registries. In the Sol de Oriente native community, the second stage of the strengthening workshops is about to begin, as the strategy to be followed is being evaluated given its social and cultural context (low level of formal education, strong presence of loggers, etc.).
The strengthening of the community organization is another of CEDIA's work axes, based on this it is considered that strengthening the capacities of native communities on the management and administration of their community is crucial because instruments, such as statutes, establish rights and obligations of those who belong to the community, how decisions will be made and how the community should organize itself to establish relationships with other actors, such as state and private entities, and thus be able to establish sustainable formal relationships that benefit them.