Inter-GAN Guatemala Project

Communities with no voice, little local leadership capacity, and, subsequently, no coordinated investments in their economic and social structures are among the most vulnerable and poorest in the world. Based on previous experience in such a community in the western region of Guatemala, we propose a 3-year process for:

• engaging the collective voice of the 28,000 indigenous people living in 48 communities around a shared watershed
• integrating and coordinating how organizations serve this collective voice (civil society, government, corporations, GANs)
• initiating self-sustaining projects with local capacities to generate the investments in economic and social structures
• developing local sustainable leadership to sustain the initiatives into the next generations
• empowering the women and girls of the communities

This multi-stakeholder, systemic-change project is designed to be scalable locally, nationally and globally, through the processes it uses and the organizations engaged. This is an "action learning project" that builds upon historic activity in Guatemala by the project team to further develop a methodology that holds great promise for addressing complex, systemic issues. Therefore, this project aims to not only substantially enhance the lives of individuals and communities in the watershed, it also aims to develop a process that can be widely applied.

For more details, please download the Guatemala Three-Year Proposal.