Giving Compass' Take:

• Isidoro Hazbun, with the Amazon Conservation Team, talks with Skoll about supporting remote communities with limited resources across the Amazon during coronavirus.

• How does this reflect the virus' disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities? What can you do to help efforts in supporting remote communities in the Amazon and other areas? 

• Discover funds to guide your giving towards vulnerable communities across the world.

Marginal access to healthcare, limited hygiene resources, and weak government support in deterring potentially contagious intruders put even the most remote communities in the Amazon at risk of the spreading pandemic. Indigenous communities—long threatened by introduced diseases—are among the most vulnerable populations in the region. In Brazil alone, the virus has already reached nearly 40 remote indigenous communities that lack the necessary healthcare resources to weather this crisis.

The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a 2008 Skoll Awardee, has for 25 years worked hand-in-hand with indigenous and local communities of the Amazon to apply the power of innovation and time-tested traditional practices to protect the forests, watersheds, and cultures of tropical South America. COVID-19 may be the biggest challenge these communities have faced in generations, and ACT has cultivated close partnerships with some of the communities most at risk in the region. We caught up last week with Isidoro Hazbun, Manager of Public Affairs & Programs Support, at ACT to hear more about how they’re working with local governments and indigenous communities in response to COVID-19, mitigate its tremendous impacts, and support the indigenous communities of the Amazon.

Isidoro Hazbun: ACT has provided an example for local authorities in terms of how to engage in this crisis and connect with the indigenous communities in these remote areas. For example, we built a model and database that the Ministry of Health in Colombia uses to guide their own work.

One of the big untold stories of this crisis concerns migration. Rural people, not only the indigenous, go to cities to sell food, or work in industries. These people have little saved for their day-to-day living and no capacity to survive in the next couple weeks.

Read the full article about supporting remote communities in the Amazon during COVID-19 with Isidoro Hazbun at Skoll Foundation.