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Women's Knowledge, Women's Priorities:
ACPC's Work with Asháninka Women in the Peruvian Amazon
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| Asháninka women, trained as health promoters, with their children at a community meeting in the village of Yoyato. |
With ancestral lands ranging across the forests of Junin, Pasco, Huanuco, and Ucayali, the Asháninka are the largest indigenous group of the Peruvian Amazon. The Association for the Preservation of Cutivireni Heritage (ACPC) first worked with the Asháninka in 1987, when ACPC launched an advocacy and mobilization effort that eventually led to the designation of a large section of Asháninka homelands as a natural preserve in the Rio Ene valley in eastern Peru. Since then, the Asháninka have faced a number of serious threats to their survival. Loggers and immigrant farmers have destroyed the forests around their communities. The infamous Peruvian terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) massacred thousands of Asháninka in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the period of sustained violence has ended, the earlier displacement has contributed substantially to the social breakdown of communities already rendered precarious by environmental encroachment.
Although the Peruvian government has provided emergency assistance to the Asháninka in the form of food, arms, and basic medical supplies, women's reproductive health needs remain largely unaddressed. Asháninka women experience high rates of violence and exert little control over the number of children they have (most women identify 4 or 5 as the preferred number of children, yet the average woman will bear 7 or 8 in her lifetime). Forty-eight percent of the Asháninka population is under the age of 15. On average, Asháninka women marry between the ages of 15 and 19, but it is not uncommon for girls as young as 12 to be married shortly following their first menstrual cycle. Most local health establishments are precariously equipped, and women face formidable cultural and language barriers in
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| Asháninka health promoters receive educational materials and supplies at a community meeting in the village of Camatavichi. |
accessing basic reproductive health services.
In an effort to address the health needs and human rights of Asháninka women, ACPC launched a reproductive health program in 2002 with the support and guidance of IWHC. In a two-day workshop, over 100 Asháninka women traced their reproductive histories, identified their most pressing health needs, and developed a series of community projects and initiatives to address the issues they had identified together. ACPC has now trained a cadre of Asháninka women to be health promoters within their communities and to act as liaisons with the public health system.
IWHC has supported ACPC since 2002. We are currently supporting its implementation of a reproductive health program for Asháninka women, incorporating women's knowledge and priorities.
For more information, visit ACPC's website.
More about IWHC's colleagues in Peru>>
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