Building Sustainable Communities: A Framework for Supporting Community Livelihoods and Poverty Alleviation in Resource Regions

Building Sustainable Communities

Description

Partners: IBF, International Mining for Development Centre (now MEfDA), Continental Gold mining company, AngloGold Ashanti, Seafields Resources Canadian Exploration Company, Local and State governments of Antioquia and Risaralda, Ministry of Mines of Colombia, The University of Queensland.

Impact: This project proposed the use of the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) as a powerful conceptual approach for research aimed at understanding the interaction between global investment, local livelihoods and poverty reduction in resource regions. The project applied the SLF as a tool to develop recommendations for poverty alleviation, showing how it can contribute to SDG 1 No Poverty. The innovative application of the SLF helps us understand the ways in which key areas of research connect and interact as constituent components inherent in the framework. This project also showed that this framework helps increase our understanding of the ways communities build capacity to forge sustainable livelihoods in resource regions. It thus presents a justification for the use of the SLF, followed by an examination of the SLF principles, their implications for communities and relevance for empirical research in this field. The project also shows the way in which the SLF can be modified for application to local circumstances through case studies conducted in two resource regions of Colombia. Nevertheless, the findings of the research can be applied to other resource locations elsewhere.