Sabiá Agroecological Development Center is a non-profit organization founded on July 9, 1993, by farmers, technicians, and academics motivated to combat hunger in the Northeast region of Brazil by strengthening family farming and agroecology. In Latin America’s semi-arid regions, climate change threatens water, food and life. Agroecology and rainwater harvesting empower communities to lead dignified, resilient climate solutions.
Located in the state of Pernambuco, the Sabiá Center has its headquarters in Recife, as well as three regional offices strategically located in the Zona da Mata, Agreste, and Sertão regions, ensuring a strong territorial presence to develop projects focused on the semi-arid region, in the Caatinga biome, but also in the Mata Sul and Recife Metropolitan Region, in the Atlantic Forest biome, with urban agriculture.
We work to strengthen agroecology as a strategy to tackle the climate emergency and promote social justice, with a focus on food and nutritional sovereignty and security for people living in rural areas, forests, and waters. All of our work is structured around technical and educational advisory services for farming families, their organizations, and vulnerable individuals, such as women, rural youth, and traditional peoples and communities.
Over more than thirty years of operation, Sabiá has implemented more than 150 socio-productive inclusion projects and actions focused on food production, territorial markets, and public policies, structuring agrobiodiversity seed networks and solidarity revolving funds. There are more than 15,000 farming families, with a portfolio that covers social and climate adaptation technologies such as consumption and production cisterns, underground dams, ecological stoves, gray water reuse, biodigesters, as well as technical assistance for family farmers in the area of productive agroecological backyards, biodiverse agroforestry systems, and agroecological animal husbandry. We work with participatory methodologies, ensuring autonomy and leadership for farming families in the execution of projects.
The institutional team is composed of about 40 professionals from different areas of expertise, including technical and administrative staff, distributed among the offices, supported by a solid infrastructure that includes our own fleet of vehicles, computers, cloud network, and territorial data collection and analysis systems. This structure allows us to guarantee qualified monitoring of Family Agricultural Production Units (UFPA) based on the principles of agroecology and popular education.
Through its active and leading participation in national and international networks and coalitions, Centro Sabiá has linked the impacts of its work to global agendas, such as climate adaptation and the growth of hunger, especially looking at biomes such as the Caatinga, which has historically been invisible in the climate arena. We are international observers at the Climate and Desertification COP, which has placed us in strategic positions for multilevel political advocacy.
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