Indigenous women mapping a sustainable future for refugees and their hosts
In Bajo Chiquito, Panama, a community on a highly transited mixed movement path is gaining digital skills and leading environmental data collection to inform effective waste management.
By Aleena Anand, Stanford in Government Fellow with UNHCR Innovation
When people are forced to flee, local communities in host countries are often the first to respond and welcome them. The Emberá-Wounaan Indigenous community of Bajo Chiquito, Panama, exemplifies this. They have welcomed thousands crossing the Darién jungle each week, playing a unique and crucial role in the crisis.
As the number of people displaced across the globe grows, so does the need to develop infrastructure supporting refugees and their host communities. In the village of Bajo Chiquito, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, collaborates with Indigenous women to address environmental challenges, develop sustainable solutions, and strengthen their capacity to manage the impact of mixed movements of refugees and migrants through their communities.
Heightened risks to environment and climate
Environmental degradation poses significant risks in and around this region, the Darién jungle, both to displaced people fleeing violence, insecurity and worsening climate impacts and to the communities hosting them. The consequences of mass displacement can exacerbate deteriorating ecosystem health, creating further risks and challenges. For Indigenous communities like Bajo Chiquito, waste pollution is a pressing concern, as existing capacity and infrastructure are insufficient to meet increasing needs.
The Darién jungle is home to vital ecosystems with remarkable biodiversity — from macaws to mangroves — as well as one of the largest carbon sinks in the region, second only to the Amazon. Although designated as a protected reserve, this culturally and ecologically significant area already faces tremendous challenges, losing on average 8.1 acres of forest per day due to deforestation, to which the increase in waste and erosion along the highly transited path is adding. Historic and current pressures mean the capacity of the jungle to capture carbon and maintain essential habitats, which contribute to local livelihoods and offer protection from natural hazards, is at stake.
To address this challenge, a committed group of 10 Emberá-Wounaan women leaders, known as the Delegadas Comunitarias Committee, spearheads a new data collection project, mapping places, services, and socioecological risks in their village. Diverging from past conservation efforts that failed to meaningfully include Indigenous voices from the beginning, this initiative — implemented with the support of UNHCR’s Data Innovation Fund — is community driven and co-designed, increasing its chances of informing effective, sustainable, and locally-tailored solutions.
The difficulty of waste management
Waste pollution is a significant challenge across Panama. Its impacts are particularly acute on Indigenous communities, many of whom possess deep-rooted relationships to the environment while receiving inadequate resources to sustain it. Bajo Chiquito — nestled in a lush rainforest clearing along the Tuquesa River, upon which the community depends for daily needs — has seen its land and waters increasingly polluted by plastic and other waste. The Emberá-Wounaan participants in this project are determined to turn this around. “We will see a cleaner community,” Nelly, one of the women mappers, promises.
A comprehensive waste management strategy is needed to maintain environmental health in Bajo Chiquito and its environs, which span roughly 150,000 square metres, or 37 acres. Support for environmental action will be essential from various stakeholders, including local government actors and UNHCR, which recognizes that climate change is increasingly a driver of displacement. Environmental and climate hazards further endanger refugees and migrants in transit, compounding existing vulnerabilities and protection risks, including gender-based violence, disease outbreaks, and food insecurity. “It is so important that [UNHCR] gets more involved in these conversations,” says Alejandra Gaviria Reyes, Information Management Officer with UNHCR Panama.
Previous efforts to address this challenge, led by external actors, repeatedly came up short. Outside waste management experts visited the village multiple times to propose solutions, but a lack of follow-up or community involvement meant these plans never got off the ground. The necessity for local leadership was evident.
Reducing pollution, growing women’s roles
Rooted in the needs, knowledge, and traditions of the population it seeks to support, the new mapping initiative is potentially transformative for Bajo Chiquito — and for UNHCR. UNHCR Panama has engaged with this community for years. During this time, the Delegadas Comunitarias Committee consistently advocated for greater women’s inclusion in community outreach.
The Delegadas are working closely alongside other community members to protect their village’s environmental health and future. In the process, they also break barriers by advancing women’s representation in changemaking spaces. “Community mapping is not new to Indigenous communities in the region,” explains Reyes, “[but] this initiative is the first time that Indigenous women are the ones involved in and leading the mapping of their community.”
UNHCR Panama collected satellite imagery of the village from 2017 and 2023, analyzing changes in infrastructure, housing, deforestation, river movements, and more. As this project got underway, the team passed the baton to the Delegadas to lead on field-based mapping, providing them with mobile devices and mapping software. Following initial training, the group has been working tirelessly to traverse the landscape and map their home, constructing an invaluable resource to identify socioecological risks — waste-choked waterways, vegetation loss, associated livelihood impacts, and more — and provide data to inform the development of waste management strategies.
Learning together
Along with navigating unfamiliar software and data science approaches, the Delegadas had to overcome unfavorable conditions and connectivity challenges. “The Wi-Fi did not pick up the signal well when the weather was overcast,” recalls Elisa, one of the participants. A lack of reliable access to connectivity is a challenge experienced by many Indigenous and displaced communities, particularly in rural areas, and, in this case, it disrupted the Delegadas’ use of the mapping software on their mobile devices. Moreover, extreme weather conditions prevented the mappers from collecting data and led to further delays. The women have persevered despite these difficulties, with all mapping nearly complete.
There was, too, a learning curve for UNHCR Panama. Over the project stages, the team has developed a deeper understanding of the communities’ needs and how best to respect and amplify their efforts. For instance, initial renderings of the community map created by UNHCR labeled locations with their Spanish names. However, after the Delegadas pointed out the significance of the area’s pre-colonial names, the Panama team decided to also produce maps in Emberá, the Indigenous language of the Emberá-Wounaan people.
Even as mapping is ongoing — paving the way for data analyses and consultations that will determine how the community confronts waste pollution — the project has already built strategic and technological capacity and made a significant difference, especially for its core participants. Nitzia, one of the Delegadas, says of her experience:
“I learned how to do online mapping, GIS mapping, with confidence. …The experience was very good, and I learned a lot.”
Charting a new way forward
As the Delegadas approach the finish line on data collection, the next steps for this initiative are already beginning to take shape. The UNHCR team is preparing finalized bilingual maps in Spanish and Emberá to be displayed in Bajo Chiquito. For many residents, it will be their first time seeing a map of their village. Equipped with this essential knowledge base — tracking how environmental impacts have evolved in recent years — the community will engage with a waste management consultant to devise adaptation strategies for a more sustainable future.
This project represents an important step toward mitigating the current and potential impacts of environmental and climatic changes on host communities, particularly Indigenous peoples, who play an outsize role in welcoming people forced to flee. Crucially, this is being accomplished through an evidence-informed, locally led approach — one that recognizes that Indigenous peoples and local communities know their own contexts best.
Localized solutions are, after all, only as robust as the involvement of the people they serve. Collaboration with Indigenous women leading social and environmental change can map the way toward more sustainable responses to forced displacement and mixed movements — ensuring host communities and displaced people alike are able to live and thrive in healthy environments.
Find out more about UNHCR’s work with Indigenous peoples and Data Innovation Programme.
