Capacity building

According to the Political Constitution, Colombia is a multi-ethnic and multicultural social state of law, organized as a unitary, decentralized republic and with autonomy from its territorial entities, among which are the Indigenous Territorial Entities. However, 30 years after the 1991 Constitution was issued, the operation of these territories has not been fully regulated because there is great complexity in their political-administrative configuration and economic and political conflicts of interest. In the Amazon region, the departments, municipalities, non-municipalized areas, indigenous reservations, jurisdictions of various indigenous organizational forms (Associations of Traditional Indigenous Authorities, Territorial Councils, etc.), made up of communities, and ancestral territories of different indigenous peoples are territorial entities with legally recognized authorities, and many of them overlap. Regardless of this, the territorial entities have the right to be governed by their own authorities and to administer the resources for the fulfillment of their functions. This is the theory, but how can this be put into practice?

Working from an intercultural health and wellbeing perspective, many critical questions are faced that frame the focus of this capacity building component, one of the pillars of the proposed health model: what is required to adequately manage a territory, what are the capacities required to do so, what is the role of each social actor in these processes, what is the role of indigenous and intercultural research, how is territorial health management operated, how to resolve the decision-making process between the visions that determine indigenous knowledge systems and the regulations that govern territorial management from the State, and how can decisions be made between the visions that determine indigenous knowledge systems and the regulations that govern territorial management from the State?

For each of the actors in the health system, the communities and traditional authorities, these questions, together with those raised in the introduction and in other components, represent a great challenge that requires a structured process of capacity building according to the role they perform, both to answer the questions and to implement the solutions.

In recent years, efforts have focused on strengthening territorial governance processes in health, both at the community level and in indigenous organizations. At the institutional level, they have focused on the transfer of methodologies developed in different components of the model and on the adaptation of programs and services.