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Key Points
At Sinergias, starting in 2024, throughout 2025, and continuing into 2026, we are strengthening the leadership of people with disabilities (PwD) and their participation in governance and advocacy spaces at the community, municipal, departmental, and national levels. We do this through community gatherings, participatory workshops, and research processes led from the ground up by PwD themselves; always working across various levels of community engagement: with the individual, the family, the community, and institutions. In addition, we promote the recognition of traditional care practices, including this population in local health customs and approaches. We drive a fundamental shift in negative perceptions regarding disability; we foster the development of person-centered life plans, collectivizing the care of PwD within each social group; and, furthermore, we advocate for the inclusion of a disability perspective within our own organizational and health systems.
This initiative has enabled us to strengthen the “Luz Propia” Steering Group, made up of people with disabilities in the town of Mitú, who have taken an active role in training, advocacy, and community support efforts. In addition, we have integrated a disability-inclusive approach across all of Sinergias’ institutional policies and practices, laying the groundwork for replicating this model in other Amazonian regions.
Why is this necessary?
The disability rights movement in Colombia is surprisingly recent: for less than 20 years, leaders with disabilities have been advocating for their basic rights. As if this delay were not enough, there is an aggravating factor: this struggle has been concentrated in urban areas. What, then, of the population with disabilities in rural areas and in the indigenous communities of the Amazon region?
Upon investigation, Sinergias found two troubling factors. On the one hand, there is underreporting in official censuses, and as we have seen with other demographic minorities, this invisibility perpetuates the violation of their rights and condemns them to never benefit from public policies designed based on reliable data. And on the other hand, people with disabilities in the Amazon are constantly excluded from decision-making processes in their own communities.
The combination of a lack of recognition and a lack of spaces or opportunities to explore their own voice and leadership progressively widens the gap between their quality of life and that of other members of their communities. Furthermore, ableism, which remains prevalent in public discourse from the community to the national level, has led to people with disabilities being sidelined in the public sphere: others speak on their behalf. One consequence of this is that there is no disability-focused approach in the Life Plans of the Indigenous and Intercultural Health System (SISPI).
Who is participating in the project?
Led by Sinergias and funded by the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), the strategy involves the active participation of indigenous people with disabilities in the four AATIAM communities: Ceima Cachivera, Mituseño, Macaquiño, and Tucunaré. At the urban level, other community leaders, traditional authorities, and the “Luz Propia” steering group in Mitú are also participating.
