Poor urban women in Medellín claim right to communicate

Sumapaz was responding to a situation in which excluded communities, among them victims of the armed conflict in Colombia, did not have effective mechanisms to claim their rights. Similarly they lack the necessary capacity and strengths to communicate their conditions of poverty and marginalization.

Sumapaz described forced displacement as a national tragedy in the face of which the State has shown itself to be ineffective. ‘It is reasonable to conclude that lack of attention to forced mass displacement... runs the risk of simply creating the final link that institutionalises it, turning the rural and urban displaced person into a poor inhabitant.’

Sumapaz carried out 12 workshops on theoretical and practical aspects of topics like ‘Women and communication rights’, ‘Poverty and communication’, ‘Alternative communication media’, ‘Communication and networking’, ‘Basic information research’, and ‘Pictorial reporting’. It also organized two meetings focusing on the situation of women. The first was on ‘The right to the city and the challenges of inclusion’, and the second ‘Being uprooted and the city: Women’s perspectives’.

Sumapaz succeeded in placing the importance of exercising communication rights on the agenda of local communities, especially with regard to vulnerable communities that need to establish their own means of communicating. Participants in the workshops got to know various popular communication initiatives and were able to create their own neighbourhood spaces to continue working on claiming their rights and producing information.

The workshops resulted in women and the grassroots organizations with which they work gaining enough knowledge to begin communicating their realities and the long process of change. Today there is a consolidated platform for exchanging information among different social organizations who, working together, can effectively tell their own stories.

So successful has the project been that Sumapaz is continuing to respond to the many expectations raised by the training and to consolidate a network of women communicators who can carry on the work.