Barabaig. Northern Tanzania As apart of our food security strategy Indigenous Knowledge Project is working with the Barabaig villagers to enhance their knowledge of food crop farming. Being that they are traditionally pastoralists, they lack critical knowledge of how to successfully grow food. With loss of access to their traditional homeland they are being forced…

Updates from the Field: Basodami Village Tanzania. Barabaig Project, Indigenous Knowledge Project As I write this Deo Muru is in the village with members from the womens group in Katesh. The women are speaking with the villagers collecting information about the health issues in the village and conducting trainings from our training manual. The women’s…

Our friends at Intercontineal Cry published a feature on the Barabaig Project. http://intercontinentalcry.org/series/the-baragaig-project/   

The following is the training manual written specifically for the Barabaig villagers and women’s group in Katesh. During the first two weeks of June we conducted trainings at the women’s group in Katesh and with the Barabaig villagers. In the village  we built 4 rain water hafirs, and in Katesh with the women’s group we…

Students at Palisades Charter High School raised $236 for the development and implementation of water hafirs for the Barabaig women. With donations from the students as apart of their “Aqua Para Aqua” initiative IKP will be building hafirs at the Barabaig of Basodami sub-village in the Hanang District of the Manyara region of North Central Tanzania….

In recognition of the importance gender mainstreaming plays in agricultural developmen, the Agriculture and Rural Development department at the World Bank, in collaboration with IFAD and FAO, has launched genderinag.org to serve as another tool to help pratictioners integrate gender into all phases of project design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and completion. http://www.genderinag.org/ginag/library    

Women play a decisive role in household food security, dietary diversity and children’s health – Republished from the FAO FAO estimates that around one billion people are undernourished, and that each year more than three million children die from undernutrition before their fifth birthday. Micronutrient deficiencies, which affect about two billion people, lead to poor…

(Full article taken from The Guardian, Tuesday 30 July 2002 21.33 written by Jo Tuckman in Mexico City) The Pope is in Mexico today to make a 16th-century Nahuatl into the continent’s first indigenous saint. It is part of a strategy to stem the advance of evangelical sects among the poor and downtrodden descendants of the first Latin American converts…

Taken from First Peoples Worldwide  “With the financial and political support of organizations like First Peoples Worldwide and Cultural Survival, the Samburu people of Kenya are refusing to become conservation refugees. Evicted from their homes in November 2010 to make room for the Laikipia National Park at the hands of U.S. based conservation groups like…

News release USDA Reminds Native American Farmers and Ranchers that Keepseagle Settlement Claims Filing Period Closes Dec. 27 The Keepseagle v. Vilsack class action lawsuit ended in a $760 million settlement in favor of Native Americans who claimed they were discriminated against by the United States Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) who denied them equal access to credit in the…

The right for indigenous people of North America to harvest food and medicine is still being fought for in courtroom battles. This past July 2011 saw a the case of Northern Paiute traditional gatherer Wesley Dick vs. the United States. At stake was the rights of Wesley Dick, Kwassuh, to gather tules in the traditional way, after…

We would like to encourage all of our readers to learn more about the work of the Maya Nut Institute whose mission is to  ”find balance between people, food and forests”. This charity teaches rural communities about the value of Maya Nut (Brosimum alicastrum) for food, fodder, ecosystem services and income. They have helped develop tools for women…

The recent floods in Thailand has meant that the world’s largest rice exporter can not meet the demands of the global market. In September the Indian government lifted its ban on rice shipments and buyers from the Philippines and Indonesia are purchasing the countries rice, meaning that India may emerge as the worlds largest rice exporting country. Due to the…

Three weeks ago the Attawapiskat indigenous community living on a treaty reservation on the James Bay coast of Canada, declared a state of emergency. The community’s housing conditions are such that families are living in shanties and tents in below freezing temperatures. To date, not one federal or provincial official acknowledged the state of emergency and come to visit the community despite…

In response to the uprising of indigenous communities throughout the Amazon the Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht said it was withdrawing from the 1278-megawatt Tambo-40 Dam on the Tambo River in the Peruvian Amazon.  After meeting with the Ashaninka of the Tambo River, Odebrecht stated they it would “respect the opinion of local populations” in pulling out of the project, which would have affected some 14,000…

Dutch botanist, Ed de Vogel,  recently identified the first night-flowering orchid in New Britain, an island near Papua New Guinea. Belonging to the Bulbophyllum genus, this is the first species of orchid known to only flower at night, other species flower both day and night. The night cactus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) is a night-flowering cactus whose blossoms opens for one night per year attracting…

Communal seed storage facilities help improve livelihood of farmers in Falema village, Mali. Prior to the construction of the seed storage warehouse, producers would have to travel miles to sell their goods. Unable to store their grains, they would have to move their crops to market in Ségou soon after harvest and sell their products for whatever price…

This website focuses on the cultural revival happening throughout native communities of North America. By reawakening their languages native people are taking charge of their history, their identity, and their culture. “Dedicated first language speakers and others are teaching their mother tongues to their communities with a special focus on the young, so that the deep knowledge embedded in their…

On Nov 9, 2011 the Red List, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), declared the Black Rhino extinct. A subspecies of white rhino in central Africa is also listed as possibly extinct, the organisation says. According to the Red List there are now more records of threatened species than ever before, 25% of the…

  Kerala has become the first State in all panchayats of India to form a biodiversity management committee. This committee is meant to ensure conservation of biodiversity, regulate it’s use, and establish equitable sharing of benefits from it’s use. The main task of the committee is to develop biodiversity registers. This means that local people will register their knowledge of associated bioresources…