WA.SA.NA

WA.SA.NA is a project that concerns the promotion of a healthy, sustainable and nutritious diet among indigenous families in the Ecuadorian Amazon of the Napo province.

The project aims to tackle down the growing rate of malnutrition that is recorded within the Napo province, Ecuador, by promoting a healthy and balanced diet based on local food resources among the indigenous Kichwa communities.

This will be possible thanks to the meeting of two cultures: on the one hand, the indigenous communities’ ancestral knowledge of their land, on the other hand the Italian culinary knowledge of how mixing ingredients.

Such synergy will allow us to support Amazonian communities to valorize and optimize their local food resources, addressing simultaneously women and family’s economic empowerment, vulnerable people’s right to food, and the preservation of biodiversity and indigenous identity.

Moreover, through the creation of a sustainable food production system the project contributes to the conservation of the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest.

 

The project main goals are:

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1. To train and raise awareness the women of the Kichwa indigenous communities about the importance of a healthy and balanced diet based on high nutritional products present in each family’s chakra;​

2. To promote female economic empowerment through the production and sale of high-quality Amazonian food products obtained from the transformation of yuca, plantain, chonta and cocoa into gluten-free flours first, and then into gluten and lactose-free sweet, biscuits and energizing snacks;​

3. To contribute to the preservation of indigenous agricultural traditions to face climate change and combat the loss of biodiversity by practicing ancestral cultivation methods, such as the “chakra agroforestry systems”.