First Visit to Candidate Sites for the Pilot Project (Cundinamarca) (2022-07-08)

On July 8, 2022, the project team made an initial visit to the candidate villages in Yacopí, Cundinamarca, with JICA Colombia Resident Representative Sato, headquarters mission members, and counterparts from the Rural Development Agency (ADR), the project implementing agency.

During the visit, they held meetings with more than 50 members of a local cacao producer cooperative that is a potential target of assistance, and held a briefing session on JICA's cooperation scheme and how to proceed with the pilot project. The meeting enabled them to gain an understanding of the support needs of the cooperative, including the fact that its diverse members, including conflict victims, ex-combatants, people with disablities, women, and youth, are working together to positively engage in activities such as joint shipment of cacao and chocolate processing, and the difficulties they face in accessing markets due to the lack of basic infrastructure. After the meeting, they also visited the homes of former combatants who are members of the cooperative and asked them about changes in their lives as cacao farmers during the conflict and now. The project would like to cooperate strongly so that this project can become a project model to promote peacebuilding in ADR, and furthermore, one of the ideal cases that farming villages under the influence of the Colombian conflict can aspire to.