The Shipibo-Konibo people have lived with the Amazon for thousands of years. They are not in need of outsiders to tell them how to care for it. What they face is a different challenge: 500 years of colonisation, land grabbing, oil contamination, and a world that too often sees the forest as resource, not home. Alianza Arkana was founded in 2011 in Yarinacocha, Peru, to be a bridge — not a director.
The organisation works exclusively in partnership with Shipibo-Konibo communities along the Ucayali River, facilitating access to tools, funding, education, and advocacy that communities define and lead themselves. Permaculture and agroforestry training, indigenous medicinal plant gardens, eco-latrines adapted to Amazonian flood cycles, Shipibo language radio (the first programme broadcast entirely in Shipibo), youth leadership development, women’s economic empowerment — these are not projects designed for communities. They are projects designed by them.
The Shipibo cosmovision holds that the forest is alive, that plants carry knowledge, that healing begins in relationship. Alianza Arkana does not teach this — it learns from it, and works to protect the conditions in which this knowledge can survive and thrive. Their model — intercultural partnership rooted in deep mutual respect — has been recognised by UNICEF, whose eco-latrine design Alianza Arkana co-developed has been adopted across the Peruvian Amazon.
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