We are honored to announce we are among the inaugural recipients of support from Daughters for Earth, a new campaign by One Earth to support women at the frontlines of climate action. Co-founded by female leaders in the women’s rights, environmental and philanthropic sectors, Daughters for Earth seeks to amplify and support women-led efforts to protect and restore our planet.
This alliance will support our collaboration with the Ogiek People of Mount Elgon, who are engaged in a legal struggle to reestablish their ancestral lands taken by colonization. In 2019 they started mapping their ancestral lands with support from Digital Democracy and Forest Peoples Programme.
Spearheaded by the Ogiek organization Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project (CIPDP) and their women-led field mapping team, the community has mapped thousands of places and significant sites, covering more than 42,000 hectares of their land. Now, they want to share their extensive mapping knowledge and skills with other communities.
“In a short amount of time, the Ogiek of Mount Elgon have become experts in the use of novel mapping technologies. This initiative will empower them to share their knowledge with other Indigenous frontline communities through a gathering on Ogiek ancestral lands, where they have carefully honed their learning.” —Emily Jacobi, Digital Democracy Executive Director & Founder
The support from Daughters for Earth will fund the gathering of an inaugural group of Indigenous community mappers from across Kenya and East Africa at the Ogiek Community Resource Center in Laboot, a village located along the slopes of Mount Elgon. The vision is for this capacity-building retreat to empower the CIPDP mapping team to become regional experts and leaders in mapping and to enable them to share their knowledge with nearby Indigenous communities, in line with Digital Democracy’s train-the-trainer methodologies.
We hope that this project will also plant the seed for future collaborations and cross-nation solidarity in the face of the many threats posed on Indigenous communities in eastern Africa.
Read more about this collaboration with Daughters for Earth here. To learn more about the Ogiek mapping work with Mapeo, read this blog post.