Balance and Harmony with Mother Earth

Petrona Flores, a proud and renowned 48-year-old indigenous woman born in a Kallawaya community of the Charazani municipality, the first municipal section of the province of Bautista Saavedra in the department of La Paz – Bolivia.

Petrona is on the staff of the Productive and Agricultural Development Direction of its municipality and has been part of the team that has carried out the difficult task of coordinating and organizing the preparation of the Climate Change Local Plan, presented to the Ministry of Planning and Development in Bolivia. After having worked for a long time on the rights of the indigenous people and on the development of several economic productive organizations, Petrona has been invited to join the mentioned Direction of Charazani.

Climate change is making it even more difficult for women to realize their basic rights and is worsening inequalities, since they are often more vulnerable than men to their impact. Moreover, many women are denied access to new information on climate change and their participation in important decision-making processes, even though they have unique skills and vital knowledge to contribute.

This comunal leader has challenged traditional gender roles that she has to face in order to attain her objective. Petrona had to show her strength and determination to achieve her objectives, breaking the rules and even cultural preconceptions, by being included in political spheres and performing a job as an advisor to the Mayor. Once she had succeeded, she started to address gender equality issues and managed to include many other women of the community. She shares her joy with a smile for her achievements with the development of the Climate Change Local Plan. Very pleased for the document she managed to prepare for her community. This document is very important because it includes a diagnosis that considers the four extensions of the Andean cross: the first covering the entire territorial and social organization (disaster risk management and climate change); the second refers to education, including the recovery of ancestral knowledge and technologies; the third dedicated to health, with special emphasis on \"Wellbeing\"[1]; the last extension dedicated to the production, the transformation and the commercialization of local products.

To achieve this goal, she managed to develop several strategies to foster or spread leadership within women. Firstly, she created a women’s organization with the aim of talking about general interests; afterwards they started to talk about gender equality as a requirement for social change and got engaged with power structures and resource control in the political, economic and social areas.

The respect gained among the other women of the community, for their initiative in seeking inclusion, was the catalyst that started a new history of women leadership in Charazani, as they started to seek a transformative social change agenda for women and demanding accountability mechanisms across the municipality.

To address climate change, the Bolivian government developed several laws and strategies. The objective is to value traditional knowledge, harmonize economic development and the rights of Mother Earth[2]; also a National Fund to finance environmental measures has been created. Key priorities are: Food Security, Right of Access to Water for all, and increasing the resilience of families and communities.

Empowerment of disadvantaged groups is a key strategy in the fight against poverty and social change. Women and men often experience and struggle with poverty in different ways. Very often, women are at the forefront of both the family and the community. Greater integration of women does not only mean empowering them, but also offering them new perspectives, new resources and opportunities. The unequal distribution of rights, resources and power - as well as repressive rules and norms - limit many people's ability to take action against climate change. This is particularly true in the case of women. Therefore, gender is a vital factor in understanding vulnerability to climate change. Women's low socio-economic status as well as other gender inequalities, such as traditional gender stereotypes and legal divisions by gender, may even be exacerbated by climate change.

She has worked on the preparation of the Climate Change Local Plan of Charazani, with the producers, the authorities of each “ayllu” (territory) and with the Director of Productive Agricultural and Livestock Development. The Plan aims to establish a municipal food company, a garment processing factory, made with alpaca wool and a coffee processing factory. It has also been considered to improve the production of citrus and fruit trees, recovering management and ancestral technologies in organic production.

Knowing that gender and entrepreneurship promotes economic and social empowerment of women and with the execution of the Plan, this communal leader supported women of her community to come up with their own solutions and to build on their assets, thought social and economic empowerment. With the Climate Change Plan, a new story is being started as it is contributing to the improvement of resilience to climate change of families and vulnerable rural communities in the Andean region of Bolivia.

Perhaps the “Resilience” concept is new in Charazani. However, it is a practice that has always been present in the community, helping the population to mitigate the effects of climate change. Aware that there is still much work to be done, Petrona is grateful for the invaluable help received by her community: “I am aware of respect from my community since, as a woman, I was leading the process” she once quoted.

[1] Weel-being is the paradigm of the Bolivian state, established in its constitution, which seeks the enjoyment of material goods in harmony and complementarity with Mother Earth.

2] Which establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony that must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration