Cadasta Foundation and Fundapaz are pleased to announce the signing of a Partnership Agreement to mutually support and advocate for improved community access to land and natural resources in Northern Argentina.
Based on a shared mission to promote equitable and sustainable development, Cadasta and Fundapaz will work together to advance the land and natural resource rights in the Chaco region of Argentina, where half of the diverse indigenous peoples and smallholder farmers live in poverty and experience high levels of land tenure and resource insecurity.
Argentina holds the largest section of Chaco—the region’s most biodiverse ecosystem, second only to the Amazon—but spans Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. Climate change effects and deforestation are threatening fragile livelihoods that depend on access to land, water, pastureland, and other resources.
Under the agreement, Fundapaz will use the Cadasta Platform—a suite of digital geospatial tools—to more quickly and easily collect community spatial and household data for areas at risk of land grabs and resource poaching. Using participatory mapping methods, communities will use the data to secure rights to land and resources and empower local decision-making and advocacy for improved services.
Cadasta’s Esri-based platform will help communities visualize and analyze data on land ownership, land use, and access to critical natural resources.
Commenting on the cooperation, Cadasta CEO Amy Coughenour noted, “Cadasta is thrilled to partner with Fundapaz. They are a respected leader in Latin America with decades of deep expertise in rural and community development. By leveraging each other’s organizational strengths, we will achieve greater impact in improving community resource rights.”
In addition, Martín Simón, Director of Provincial Programs of Fundapaz, stated: “One of the main goals of Fundapaz is to increase the visibility of our actions carried out together with farmer and indigenous organizations in Argentina. Our task becomes very relevant when we manage to transform small actions of access to land, water and sustainable management of production and natural resources into public policies. This happens only when the actions become visible. We are convinced that our agreement with Cadasta generates great potential in this respect.”
Fundapaz’s strategic community support and advocacy, together with Cadasta’s innovative platform and tools, will bolster each partner’s work, and lead to the empowerment of families and communities and greater regional impact.
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Cadasta Foundation is a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit launched in 2015 to meet the growing demand of documenting land and resource rights for those left out of formal land administration systems in emerging economies. Cadasta works to tackle land administration constraints with easy-to-use digital tools and technology designed to help its partners efficiently document, analyze, store, and share critical land and resource rights information – particularly in places where governments are failing in delivering the public good of equitable and affordable land administration.
For more information about Cadasta’s work visit: https://cadasta.org/
Fundapaz is a non-profit civil organization that has been supporting sustainable rural development with indigenous communities and farmer families in the Chaco region of Argentina since 1973. Its mission is to promote territorial, equitable and sustainable human development in northern Argentina, building capacity and strengthening the relationship among public, private, national and international actors. It aspires to become a strategic actor with social legitimacy, recognized for its capacities and results, promoting full access and exercise of rights by indigenous and farmer communities and their organizations in the sustainable management of their territories and resources.
For more information about Fundapaz’s work and mission visit: https://www.fundapaz.org.ar/
