in fulfilling our rights and freedoms. We don’t even get the minimum for economic social
and cultural rights from the Colombian government.
Moreover, Colombian women continue suffer triple discrimination first because they are
poor, second because they are black, and third because they are women despite the fact
that there are programs for women they don’t take a differentiated approach to make
visible Afro-women and which are directed at providing solutions to their social and
economic problems so our recommendation would be that the government and national
private and international private investors must respect the right to FPIC and the rights of
Afro-Colombians to chose their own priorities for development in so far as anything
affects their life spiritual well-being, their land and we would like as much as possible to
manage our own economic social and cultural development. Furthermore the right of
these people to take part in the formulation and implementation evaluation of
development plans and programs at national and regional levels, which might have a
direct impact on us. So this is a complex picture, and as I said in the outset that I am part
of the Municipal Association of Women.
I just like to take the last two minutes I have to share with you a practice that we engage in
despite the difficulties we face in our country, our association is developing a number of
initiatives all in defence of our rights and I would particularly like to emphasize a process
that has been underway in the framework of economic development initiatives to
contribute to food security income and environmental protection with the support of the
international organisations for migration after our women were displaced following a
massacre we were then returned and we organised ourselves in order to recover our
land our crops and our way of life and that is how we together with the support of the
National Organisation for Migrations, we planned our project where and with whom and
when we were going to implement it and today we have been able to implement a number
of productive activities which enable us to contribute us to food security, environmental
recovery, enable us to generate a rotation fund as we Afro-Colombian Women have a lot
of limitations on access to banks because we don’t have any property as collateral for
credit. So we are building up our small rotating fund to provide credit to women for seeds
and other inputs for their crops, where all processes to strengthen organisations further
our culture and our ethnic culture particularly among the Afro-Colombian women.
One last recommendations we have engaged in this very minor experience but we think
that it could be an example of a practice that can contribute not just to achieving the peace
that we all so much desire but to ensure respect to life and ethnic and cultural diversity
which is present in all countries in the world. I would therefore urge international aid
agencies to support this sort of initiative in different parts of our country because we
believe this is one possible way. Thank you.