HISTORY

The Peasant Development Association (ADC in Spanish) was officially born in El Encano in the year 1980, motivated by the urgency in the face of the natural, economic and sociocultural devastation that the region and its inhabitants were experiencing. Today we are more than 3,500 people, belonging to 600 peasant and indigenous families who live in eight municipalities located in ecologically different areas of the department of Nariño, in the south west of Colombia. Together, we build on a daily basis the option of life that consists of generating a familiar, natural, social and political environment, attractive and capable of ensuring that peasants remain in the countryside.  Our option is very simple and we like it: we seek to be happy with our particular way of being and doing, according to what we have and where we are. The principles on which we base our action are: We are all different: we recognize our differences and we seek to translate them into complementarity. We all have the right to be happy: happiness has an individual character; nobody can be happy for another person. We like to do what pleases us most and satisfies us: we assume the commitments that give us pleasure. With these simple premises we open the way to strengthen a methodology that is based on three key components: The valuation of oneself, according to the way of of doing, of having and being. The valuation of others, families, neighbors, cultural community. The assessment of environments, natural, social, economic and political.

Mission

Through the execution and implementation of plans, programs and projects of formation, advice and permanent accompaniment from the areas of Food Sovereignty and Conservation of Biodiversity, Heirs of the Planet, Organization and Management for Local Living and Information Systems and Communications, The mission of the ADC is to promote the construction of peasant social actors in the region, men, women, youth and children to overcome the minimum threshold of satisfaction for each of their fundamental needs; strengthening their self-dependence and permanently increasing harmony in the relationship with their natural, social, cultural, economic and political environments.

Vision

The ADC is a non-governmental entity, autonomous, positioned regionally and locally, with an impact on the participatory construction of public policies, as a contribution to the well-being of the rural communities of south-western Colombia, from a Human Scale Development perspective.

Goals

• Accompany socially and technically organized peasants, for the construction of processes of community self-management and local living.
• Strengthen the articulation of the different peasant social actors of the region to be valid interlocutors with other public and private actors in the collective construction of local development.
• Strengthen the processes of biodiversity conservation and agro-ecological production to contribute to food sovereignty, the preservation and defense of life in all its forms.
• Strengthen the organization processes of children and young people in the region in the search for generational relief for local well-being, focusing on the sustainability of the proposal over time.
• Promote the appropriation of the media as a tool for the preservation and dissemination of the proposal and the practical impact on participatory environmental management.