An IALA (Latin American Institute for Agroecology) is the name given to a national school that allows 20 women to develop their technical and methodological skills. The school also provides women with training in order to analyse social and political issues from a gender-based perspective. The women who are enrolled in the school become empowered as a political subject and an activist for change in their community. They view matters on peasant agriculture using a global, local, theoretical and practical vision.
The School includes a socio-political vision of food sovereignty and feminist and popular peasant farming. The goal of which is to ensure that in the medium and long term, such a vision can influence and change agricultural production systems – starting from the social function of the land and guaranteeing high-quality food. Moreover, the school seeks to promote diversified agriculture that would tackle climate change and foster the creation of a committed gender-balanced peasant social fabric that includes young people.
The National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women in Chile (ANAMURI), as part of it work, has been supporting the Latin American Institute for Agroecology 'Sowers of Hope' (IALA Chile) – a training process for rural women that aims to provide technical and political training using agroecology in an effort to achieve food sovereignty.
The IALAs are part of the political strategy of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organisations (CLOC Vía Campesina). They recover ancestral knowledge in order to produce food under the principle of food sovereignty and resist the capitalist production model that is destroying the planet.
- Creating networks
- Feminist or all female collective
- Peasant movement, Peasant organisation