By Wilson Odhiambo
Nairobi, Aug 8 2022 – New telemedicine technology, Daktari Smart, aims to mitigate the gap between child patients and medical specialists in rural Kenya.

Officially launched in November 2021, the system was built to help sick children have easy access to medical specialists minus the cost of being physically present (remote/digital access). According to them, this will help optimise the delivery of healthcare systems.

Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentist Board estimate that the current patient-to-doctor ratio is 6,355 to 1. These statistics highlight the difficulty that patients have in accessing qualified medical personnel and specialists. Patients from rural and marginalised areas are especially disadvantaged, with some dealing with a total lack of adequate facilities. Others are left to contend with referrals that see them delay treatment.

Daktari Smart thus comes in as the “haven” that these patients had been waiting for, targeting over 32,000 children in Homabay, Samburu, Baringo and Lamu counties in its first phase of operation.

“Daktari Smart is a telemedicine device that offers connections between different counties or locations and the provider of the services,” says Olivia Achieng, program coordinator at Gertrude’s Hospital Foundation.

“This telemedicine system involves electronic medical devices connected to form a platform that enables the clinical workers at the different counties to interact directly with the specialists and sub-specialists in Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital.”

Like many developing countries, Kenya is characterised by limited health facilities in rural areas. Most health specialists and special care facilities are located in the city, mainly Nairobi. Kenyatta National Hospital, Nairobi hospital, and Aga Khan Hospital are among the largest and most reputable hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, but are over 400 kilometres from Lamu, Homabay, and Samburu counties.

Specialists include paediatricians, surgeons, psychiatrists, and neurologists – the list is long.

“The poor doctor-to-patient ratio makes it hard to get specialists in far-flung areas, making it hard for these patients to get the quality care they deserve. To get the specialist care they need, they will need to travel to cities like Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret or Nakuru, which is expensive and time-consuming. This is the gap that Daktari Smart is trying to bridge,” Achieng explained.

Rather than send the patient to a different facility or hospital, the referral process will now be able to be done within the same facility. The patient will be booked and referred over the telemedicine platform.

According to Achieng, the system comprises several electronic devices such as a stethoscope, vital sign monitor, derma scope, electrocardiogram, and ultrasound machine, among many other medical devices assembled to form the telemedicine platform.

Children in rural Kenya can now benefit from a full health assessment without travelling for miles to urban centres. Credit: Daktari Smart

All these devices are attached to a monitor, which allows the specialist to see the patient’s information in real-time. This means that the specialist doesn’t have to rely on second-hand information or someone else’s interpretation of the patient’s condition because they can see everything as it is transmitted first-hand.

Anyango said that once the specialist in Nairobi is done attending to the children he is with, he can then go to the telemedicine room and see whether he has any bookings from Lamu, Samburu, Homabay or Baringo county.

“It is also important to note that this is a paediatric referral platform which means that before a child is referred, he or she has to be properly assessed by the health worker to determine whether or not the case requires a specialist’s attention,” she said.

The M-PESA Foundation invested over Ksh 168 million (about 1.4 million US dollars) in the project, with the expectation of bringing on board two more needy counties and ensuring they can help as many patients as possible.

“One of our main pillars under M-PESA Foundation is healthcare. For this particular telemedicine program, we have partnered with Gertrude’s Hospital Foundation, Gertrude’s Hospital and Safaricom PLC,” said Karen Basiye, Director, Sustainable Business, Social Impact and M-PESA Foundation.

“Our aim is to address the delays in receiving adequate healthcare in rural and underserved areas through telemedicine, starting with Samburu, Homabay, Baringo and Lamu Counties. Two other counties will be brought on board in the next phase of this program,” Basiye told IPS.

“Patients, who have children aged up to 21 years, who would otherwise have to spend a significant amount of time and money on travelling long distances to urban areas to seek care, will now be able to receive specialist care from their local health facility. As a foundation, we are the program’s main funder, investing over Ksh 168 million towards the initiative over the next three years,” added Basiye.

Basiye said that the bandwidth requirement for the system is low, ranging from 512kps to 2Mbps, which makes it suitable for use in rural areas with poor internet connectivity.

“The mission and vision for Gertrude’s Hospital Foundation are to ensure the poor and the needy in the community are taken care of. We noted that the hard-to-reach areas in Kenya are underserved in terms of medical specialists, and this project thus enables us to offer the health part, while M-PESA Foundation helps with the financial side,” Anyango continued.

Dr Alex Owino, Medical Superintendent, Katulani Sub- County hospital, Kitui, agrees that Daktari smart is a great initiative given the few specialist doctors who handle delicate and complex medical cases.

“Most of these specialist doctors are found in major towns, which makes access to specialist care by patients from rural areas very difficult as they have to use a lot of resources just to get to them,” Owino told IPS. “The whole of Kitui county, for instance, has only three paediatricians serving it, which means that general practitioners like ourselves will have to cover the gaps”.

“Having specialists use technology to provide care for patients in hard-to-reach areas will thus lead to better health outcomes as it cuts the need for movement for patients who need help and health workers who may need training,” Owino said.

Owino explained technology is quickly revolutionising medicine with various gadgets and applications being introduced to help improve areas of weakness that have mainly been witnessed in developing countries.

“This technology will not only help the patients but also be very useful in helping improve the knowledge and skills for the health workers in those areas,” Owino concluded.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 8 2022 – The battle against racism and inequality will be a long one in Brazil, because a prejudice against the intellectual capacity of blacks is a problem rooted in the national culture, and even in the minds of Afro-Brazilians themselves, as well as highlighted in the country’s official history.

The basic idea spread is that Brazil is the creation of its Portuguese colonizers, especially with regard to everything that requires brains, lamented Luciana da Cruz Brito, professor of history at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB).

Few recognize Machado de Assis, considered the greatest Brazilian writer, and Mario de Andrade, another great writer and leader of the modernist movement of a century ago, as black.

“Most believe that the Rebouças were white, whose last name is on a Rio de Janeiro tunnel and avenues in São Paulo and Porto Alegre, which pay homage to them,” Brito told IPS by telephone from Cachoeira, a city of 33,000 inhabitants in the state of Bahia, where the UFRB’s Center for Arts, Humanities and Literature is located.

The brothers André and Antonio Rebouças were the first black engineers in Brazil, responsible for the construction of several ports, railroads and highways. The former was also prominent in the Paraguayan War or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870, which united Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay) and in the movement for the abolition of slavery.

Brazil was the last Western country to put an end to slavery, by a law signed by Princess Isabel de Bourbon e Bragança, daughter of Emperor Pedro II, on May 13, 1888. The Brazilian monarchy would fall 18 months later, to a military coup that proclaimed the country a republic.

Highlighting the step taken by the princess as a decisive and even unique measure is part of the whitening of the history of Latin America’s largest and most populous country.

This official history seeks to conceal or downplay the role of abolitionists and of the black movement, which celebrates Black Consciousness Day every Nov. 20, the date of the assassination of the hero of the black struggles, Zumbi, in 1695.

Ignoring black history

White historiography, in which indigenous and black people are not counted as full subjects, is a great barrier to the struggle against racism, and to reducing Brazil’s notorious inequality, Brito said, recalling the conclusions of another black woman historian, Beatriz Nascimento, who was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro in 1995, at the age of 52.

From abolition to the first decades of the 20th century, the Brazilian elite deployed a campaign of “white supremacy, which considered blacks an obstacle to the vision of European nationhood and the mixing of races a sabotage to Europeanization,” she said.

The whitening policy included the promotion of European immigration to replace slave labor in the coffee harvest and other agricultural and industrial activities.

Black participation in the most productive agricultural sectors, in industrialization and the emergence of a national bourgeoisie, with the rise of artisans to entrepreneurs, was ignored, and this strengthened their exclusion, wrote Joel Rufino dos Santos, a historian and writer who died in 2015, in his book “El Saber del negro” (The Knowledge of Blacks).

But the whitewashing of history, with the systematic erasure of black knowledge and talent in the construction of the nation, is “a perverse and effective policy” in neutralizing anti-racism efforts and will therefore prolong the problem, said Brito.

Brazil’s history ignores blacks even though they make up 56 percent of the population. Among other forms of discrimination, it limits their participation to brute, dehumanized labor, destroys self-esteem and hinders the progress of people of African descent by spreading the belief that blacks are intellectually less capable. CREDIT: Courtesy of Luciana Brito

Epistemicide

“It destroys self-esteem and instills in the minds of black students the message that they are not capable of learning, of being creative. It’s a barrier to learning, children go to school out of obligation, not to learn,” she said.

It is “epistemicide,” said Natalia Alves, a history teacher who volunteers at Educafro (Education and Citizenship of Afrodescendants and the Destitute), a non-governmental network of educational centers that facilitate the inclusion of the poor, especially blacks, in universities, through scholarships and preparatory courses.

Epistemicide is the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge, or the suppression or death of forms of knowledge of peoples considered marginal by the colonial or dominant culture.

Blacks are treated as “abject objects” and the fact that the first universities were founded in Africa is ignored, as is the fact that the arrival of enslaved Africans contributed to Brazil’s agricultural development and to the gold mining boom that enriched the current state of Minas Gerais, she told IPS by e-mail from Rio de Janeiro.

The gold boom in southern Minas Gerais, which began at the end of the 17th century and peaked in the following century, owes a great deal to people from Africa. This golden period saw the birth of historic cities such as Ouro Preto, initially Vila Rica and today a tourist center whose ancient churches give a central place to sculptures of Antonio Francisco Lisboa alias Aleijadinho, a black man.

The Portuguese colonizers did not know much about mining and metallurgy, so they brought slaves with knowledge of these activities from the Gold Coast, an extensive area along the coasts of present-day Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, Laurentino Gomes wrote in the second volume of his trilogy “Slavery”.

Gomes is a journalist who became a highly successful writer of books on Brazilian history.

Brazil’s official history erases the intellectual contributions of people of African descent to the construction of the country, condemning them to precarious jobs and marginalization in Brazilian society, according to Natalia Alves, a volunteer history teacher at Educafro, a non-governmental network of centers that facilitate access to university for black and poor people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Natalia Alves

Black protagonists made invisible

There are many examples of the intellectual, technical or artistic protagonism of Afro-descendants who are largely invisible or neglected. This is the case of important black women writers, such as Carolina Maria de Jesus, who recounted her life in a favela or shantytown in the 1960s, and Conceição Evaristo, both now belatedly recognized, according to Alves.

In addition, the teaching of the history of African and indigenous cultures in primary and secondary schools, as required by a 2008 law, is not implemented as it should be, and the media “reinforce stigmas” by reporting on police massacres in the favelas, which occur frequently in Rio de Janeiro, she said. Poverty ends up becoming the culprit.

The advances achieved by Afro-descendants and the poor include university entrance quotas started by the State University of Rio de Janeiro in 2000 and made mandatory nationwide by a 2012 law.

This type of affirmative action, aimed at reducing inequalities, is effective, according to data and studies.

In the United States, where affirmative action measures began to be adopted in the 1970s, blacks have reached the presidency – Barack Obama (2009-2017) – and the position of secretary of state – Colin Powell (2001-2005) and Condoleezza Rice (2005-2009) – in addition to achieving prominence in film, music and sports.

“The civil rights movement exposed U.S. racism to the world in the 1950s and 1960s, then quotas produced that number of prominent blacks, even though they are a minority,” just 13 percent of the U.S. population, stressed Brito, who specialized in the study of slavery in Brazil and the United States.

In Brazil, Afro-descendants (including blacks and people of mixed-race) make up 56 percent of the country’s population of 214 million, according to the official census. But they are still a minority (38 percent) in the universities and have the worst indicators in poverty, unemployment and murders, totally disproportionate to their share of the population.

However, the country adopted university quotas for blacks and the poor four decades after the United States. The results should emerge in a few more decades, the professor hopes.

But “what does a black body raised to the power structure actually change, if it does not change the structure of racism, which continues to provoke violence and where recent murders of young black men sparked the massive ‘Black Lives Matter (#Blacklivesmatter)’ protests?” asked Alves.

The 50 percent quotas in public universities for high school students from public schools, where the majority are black, do not take into account the reality of areas such as the Recôncavo region of Bahia, where 80 percent of the population is black, said Professor Brito.

In addition, the budget cuts imposed on them by the current far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro have reduced scholarships and resources, mainly to the detriment of poor students, she stressed.

By External Source
TONGA, Aug 8 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Tonga was still picking up the pieces after the Hunga volcanic eruption and tsunami waves when the pandemic reached its shores.

The volcano’s ashfall had damaged roads, polluted water and destroyed crops. The tsunami waves battered homes and strewn debris inland. The telecommunications services connecting people to their families were just coming back online as news of the first COVID-19 cases broke.

A lockdown was swiftly announced to curb an uncontrolled spread of the virus. Though a critical public health intervention, it was an additional blow to the island nation – compounding the issues for many people already struggling to rebuild after Hunga.

In response, the Talitha Project – an NGO committed to empower young women ages 10 to 24 to make informed decisions through informal education, lifeskills and development programmes in Tonga – took to the airwaves.

The new radio programme Tui ha’o Sei ‘Amanaki Lelei (Positive Sei) aims to support young people through this challenging time. A significant 55% of the population of Tonga – more than half are young people under 25.[1]

“We saw that the people’s confidence was low because they were traumatised by these unpredictable crises,” explained Vanessa Heleta, Founder and Director of the Talitha Project in Tonga. “We decided to create a radio programme particularly targeting youths to direct their focus to find positiveness in the midst of all the chaos.”

“It’s a part of our recovery process that, even though we had these major climate disasters and now a health crisis, we need to realise that life has to go on with a positive direction. Even if it’s a little step, we have to reboot and reorder because there are so many great things ahead and we really want to see our young people become the best version of themselves.”

Vanessa, Katrina and Alokoulu

Vanessa is joined by colleagues from the Talitha Project including Mama Trina (Katrina Ma’u Fatiaki), Funky Mary (Mele Fonua) and DJ Ulu (Alokoulu) and the team makes for easy and inspiring listening.

“It’s been great to hear from youth and also parents who say ‘we love your show its real, authentic and you talk from the heart’,” shared Katrina. “Feedback like this continues to remind us about our purpose as agents of change.”

“The show has helped lift the morale and self-esteem of youth. With the circumstances we are in – from natural disasters to pandemic – it’s times like this, we need to uplift each other and support each other which is what the show is all about”.

To date, the hosts have discussed a range of issues including the importance of cultivating a positive attitude, healthy relationships and making the right choices. Many of these topics have been listener requests – a positive sign, according to the team, as they want to ensure that the programme is engaging for young people.

Although there have been calls for a daily radio spot, Tui ha’o Sei ‘Amanaki Lelei has been a weekly, one-hour show since it started on 22 February. Vanessa hopes to see the radio programme continue as long as it is needed.

“We are in lockdown and people are recovering at different stages,” she said. “We have been supporting one another at this time and need to continue doing so. This lockdown can be a blessing as well for families to reconnect and also taking into account the different abuses in households during this time. “

The Tui ha’o Sei ‘Amanaki Lelei programme is airs Wednesdays from 8 to 9pm on 88.6FM and livestreamed on the Talitha Project’s Facebook page.

The Talitha Project is supported by the Pacific Girl programme – funded by Australia and managed through the Pacific Community (SPC) Pacific Women Lead.

[1] 55,270 of Tonga’s 100,651 population (55%) according to the Tonga 2016 Census of Population and Housing. This figure is the sum total of: Less than 1 year of age; Children aged 1-14; and Youth aged 15-24.

By Jamison Ervin
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 8 2022 – The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, commemorated annually on August 9, is a day to celebrate the many contributions of the 476 million Indigenous peoples worldwide.

As the world grapples with a planetary crisis of both biodiversity loss and climate change, scientists and policy makers are racing to find viable solutions. Increasingly, they are recognizing that the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples could well provide cost-effective nature-based solutions.

For example, the authors of a recent national environmental assessment in Australia have for the first time recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledge in avoiding catastrophic fires; a new federal program in Canada provides funding for Indigenous coastal guardians, in recognition of their unique knowledge; and Indigenous knowledge of tiger behavior is helping avoid human-wildlife conflicts in Nepal.

This is a radical departure from the past, when the knowledge and efforts of Indigenous peoples has traditionally been marginalized or discredited.

The emerging recognition of the importance of Indigenous knowledge of the natural world is part of a broader dawning awareness that there are cracks in our global capitalist system – cracks that if allowed to continue to grow, pose an existential threat to humanity.

The front page headline from the Financial Times in 2019, “Capitalism. Time for a Reset,” summarizes what is needed – a profound transformation in the global status quo on how we protect, restore and manage natural resources, and a reset on our relationship with Indigenous peoples, especially women and youth.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first Equator Prize, a UNDP-led partner initiative that recognizes Indigenous peoples and local communities from around the world who use sustainable nature-based solutions to achieve their local development needs.

Joining 264 winners from the past, among this year’s ten winners, selected from a pool of over 500 nominations from 109 countries, are several examples that illustrate the social and economic transformations needed to put Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous women, at the forefront of a new pact with nature.

At the forefront of restoration knowledge

The Associação Rede de Sementes do Xingu from Brazil brings together women from 25 Indigenous and agricultural communities to collect and commercialize over 220 different species of native seeds for large-scale ecological reforestation of the Amazon and the Cerrado.

In doing so, they have generated more than $700,000 in local incomes, financially empowering Indigenous women throughout the region. The organization also partners with local research institutions to exchange and blend local and technical knowledge, practices, and research to combat industrial agriculture and mass deforestation, seed by seed.

Restoration is a social and ecological imperative; the latest Global Land Outlook found that as much as 40% of the world’s lands are degraded. And while the global community has pledged to restore a billion hectares of degraded land by 2030, it is through the knowledge and action of community members such as those from the Associação Rede de Sementes do Xingu that can help make these pledges a reality.

The Organización de Mujeres Indígenas Unidas por la Biodiversidad de Panamá is an Indigenous, women-led organization in Panama uses Indigenous knowledge of conservation techniques to protect jaguars, while preserving both their territory and their culture.

The recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems found that more than a million species are at risk of extinction, and large predators such as jaguars are especially vulnerable to disruptions in habitat connectivity, particularly in a place such as Panama, which serves as a narrow connectivity corridor between continents.

The Indigenous knowledge and actions of OMIUBP play an essential and outsized role in safeguarding the future of jaguars in the Americas.

At the forefront of sustainable supply chains

The Sunkpa Shea Women’s Cooperative of Ghana, an Indigenous, women-led cooperative, is setting an example for sustainable commodity production through their shea butter production cooperative. The cooperative has redefined production practices in the region by developing a Community Resource Management Area that includes zones of for production areas, no-take zones and limited-use areas.

Their management plan also includes ecosystem restoration with Indigenous food forests, as well as traditional fire management practices that mitigate wildfire risk in this drought-prone region of Ghana. By integrating their organic production into international supply chains, they are improving the lives of 800 women, while safeguarding biodiversity and eliminating deforestation.

While hundreds of companies have pledged to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains, few have achieved this goal. It is through progressive groups such as the Sunkpa Shea Women’s Cooperative of Ghana that we see true progress.

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, commemorated annually on August 9, with the theme of the role of Indigenous women in the preservation of traditional knowledge, is a timely reminder of the profound transformations we need now, and the need to foster the vital role of women in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge at the core of Indigenous identity, culture, and heritage.

This year’s Equator Prize winners are an inspiration that these transformations are already underway, and that effective women-led solutions to our planetary crises are at hand.

Learn more about the winners on the Equator Initiative’s website, and join us for a celebration on November 30 at the virtual Nature for Life Hub.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

The writer is Manager, UNDP’s Global Programme on Nature for Development

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Aug 8 2022 – Nothing –or too little– has changed since Hollywood started producing its spectacular western movies. Rough men, ranchers, mercenary killers, saloons, cowboys, guns, gold fever, the ‘good sheriff’… and the ‘bad indians”. Those movies were anything but fiction–they were real history.

Add to this mix, the deeply-rooted, widely dominating culture of the so-called “white supremacy.”

Consequently, the hollywoodian production has constantly depicted the “indians” as savage and ruthless, uncivilised people who devastate the lands of well-intentioned colonisers, burn their homes, steal their horses, kill them, and hang their skulls as trophies.

Asia has the largest concentration of Indigenous Peoples with 70.5 %, followed by Africa with 16.3 %, and Latin America with 11.5 %. In Canada and the United States of America, Indigenous Peoples represent 6.7 % of the total population

The show goes on. And the victims are the same ones: the Indigenous Peoples.

Century after century, the indigenous peoples have been living in their lands in a perfect harmony with Nature, on which their life dependens. They know how to guard precious natural resources and are the custodians of 80% of biodiversity.

But, tragically, the very richness in natural resources which the original people of Planet Earth have been keen to conserve and preserve, soon stood behind their dramatic fate.

The modern cowboys

Exactly like in those movies, the world’s biggest modern, intrepid cowboys–the giant private corporations, have been systematically depleting those natural resources for the sake of making profits.

The current world ranchers and their cowboys appear to be the big business of timber, livestock, intensive agriculture, mono-culture, mining, carbon, oil, dams, land grabbing, luxurious resorts, golf camps, wild urbanisation, and a long etcetera.

The consequences such depletion are, among many others:

• While humanity used to cultivate more than 6.000 plant species for food, now instead fewer than 200 of these species make major contributions to food production, now only 9% account for 66% of total crop production. Once depleted, big business supplants Nature with synthetic food.

• Over the last 50 years, the global economy has grown nearly fivefold, due largely to a tripling in extraction of natural resources and energy that has fuelled growth in production and consumption.

• Three quarters of the land and two thirds of the oceans are now impacted by humans. One million of the world’s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction, and many of the ecosystem services essential for human well- being are eroding.

• Around one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction.

• The Planet is losing 4.7 million hectares of forests every year – an area larger than Denmark.

They are the ancestors

The number of indigenouos peoples is estimated at nearly 500 million, similar to the combined population of the European Union’s 27 member countries, or the total inhabitants of two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers–the United States and the Russian Federation.

The figure refers to those who identify themselves as being indigenous or indegenous descendents. Many others opt for no admitting themselves as such, due to worldwide growing wave of xenophobia.

According to the United Nations, Indigenous Peoples consider 22% of the world’s land surface their home. They live in areas where around 80% of the Planet’s biodiversity is found on not-commercially-exploited land.

And at least 40% of the 7,000 languages used worldwide are at some level of endangerment. Indigenous languages are particularly vulnerable because many of them are not taught at school or used in the public sphere.

Key facts:

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that:

• There are in fact more than 476 million Indigenous Peoples in the seven socio-cultural regions of the world, in 90 countries, belonging to more than 5,000 different groups.

• Asia has the largest concentration of Indigenous Peoples with 70.5 %, followed by Africa with 16.3 %, and Latin America with 11.5 %. In Canada and the United States of America, Indigenous Peoples represent 6.7 % of the total population.

• Indigenous Peoples make up 6.2% of the global population with the majority living in middle-income countries.

• Indigenous Peoples represent more than 19% of the extreme poor.

• Indigenous Peoples’ territories encompass 28% of the surface of the globe and contain 11% of the world’s forests.

• Indigenous Peoples’ food systems have high levels of self-sufficiency ranging from 50 % to 80% in food and resources generation.

Abused also by job markets

Meanwhile, Indegnous Peoples are considerably abused also by the job markets. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO):

• Globally, 47% of all Indigenous Peoples in employment have no education, compared to 17% of their non-indigenous counterparts. This gap is even wider for women.

• More than 86% of Indigenous Peoples globally work in the informal economy, compared to 66% for their non-indigenous counterparts.

• Indigenous Peoples are nearly three times as likely to be living in extreme poverty compared to their non-indigenous counterparts.

Indigenous women

Indigenous women are the backbone of Indigenous Peoples’ communities and play a crucial role in the preservation and transmission of traditional ancestral knowledge, states the 2022 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August)

They have an integral collective and community role as carers of natural resources and keepers of scientific knowledge. And many indigenous women are also taking the lead in the defence of Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories and advocating for their collective rights worldwide, the UN further explains.

“However, despite the crucial role indigenous women play in their communities as breadwinners, caretakers, knowledge keepers, leaders and human rights defenders, they often suffer from intersecting levels of discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity and socio-economic status.”

Poverty, illiteracy, no sanitation, no health services, no jobs…

Indigenous women particularly suffer high levels of poverty; low levels of education and illiteracy; limitations in the access to health, basic sanitation, credit and employment; limited participation in political life; and domestic and sexual violence, reports the World Day.

Besides, their right to self-determination, self-governance and control of resources and ancestral lands have been violated over centuries.

Small but significant progress has been made by indigenous women in decision-making processes in some communities, achieving leadership in communal and national roles, and standing on the protest frontlines to defend their lands and the planet’s decreasing biodiversity.

“The reality, however, remains that indigenous women are widely under-represented, disproportionately negatively affected by decisions made on their behalf, and are too frequently the victims of multiple expressions of discrimination and violence.”

In short, the world’s human ancestors have systematically fallen defenseless victims to subjugation, marginalisation, dispossession, exclusion, stigmatisation and discrimination.

Simply, claiming their due rights implies losing business profits.