Social assessment for the Nicaragua Rural Municipalities Project : Poverty, gender, and indigenous issues in the integration of environment and rural reconstruction assistance (英语)
摘要
The objective of the Rural Municipalities Project is to improve the management of natural resources to alleviate rural poverty by (a) improving the capacity of national and local institutions to make and enforce sectoral policies, (b) increasing the quality... 更多显示
The objective of the Rural Municipalities Project is to improve the management of natural resources to alleviate rural poverty by (a) improving the capacity of national and local institutions to make and enforce sectoral policies, (b) increasing the quality of public investment in a more sustainable use of natural resources that is oriented toward poverty reduction, and (c) enhancing prevailing conservation efforts. During its first year of implementation the project will focus on the western departments of Leon and Chinandega. To prepare the project, the Nicaraguan government used several consultation and participatory mechanisms, including a series of workshops with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), community representatives, and local organizations and leaders. These stakeholders, with their on-the-ground presence and firsthand knowledge, made important contributions to the project's preparation from the very beginning. Because the project cuts across different natural resources and sectors, stakeholder participation was integrated into several project preparation instruments, including the environmental assessment (EA), the biodiversity strategy, and the social assessment (SA). In accordance with the project's implementation schedule, the SA initially focused on the western region. The next step is to take the SA to the Atlantic region, and o include an Indigenous Development Plan for groups in that area. This paper concentrates on the contribution of the SA to project design. The main objectives of the SA were to identify key stakeholders, identify the rural poor and assess their living conditions, understand the views of the poor on the causes of poverty and how it can be overcome, understand existing farming systems and their constraints, evaluate the main needs of the poor, and obstacles to income generation, evaluate linkages between poverty and environmental degradation, assess the degree to which the rural poor are organized into NGOs and/or community-based organizations, assess the strength of local organizations and the kind of services the rural poor obtain from them, evaluate the stakeholders' perceptions of local governments, evaluate key gender issues and how the project should address them, and make recommendations on how to eliminate/mitigate risks, stabilize migration, and strengthen the capacity of community organizations to better deliver project services. As part of the SA, the Sutiaba indigenous group was also analyzed. The Sutiabas today constitute an ethnically diverse population coming from different areas of León and other parts of the country.
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