Andrea Buitrago

Andrea is Colombian, born in Bogotá, and has been living in the Amazon region for five years. She earned her degree in Anthropology at the National University of Colombia and completed her master's degree in Education at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. She has worked for over 14 years in the formulation, development, and evaluation of processes to strengthen community development alternatives and social organization in different regions of Colombia. She also works on the articulation, design, and implementation of collaborative work between universities and rural communities (especially peasants and Indigenous people). This work has focused on developing co-responsible, respectful, and mutually beneficial academic-community processes.

She joined the Riverscapes project in January 2023 as a local coordinator in Colombia. She carried out the stakeholder mapping exercise and facilitated the subsequent dialogue and co-creation of initiatives to strengthen local conservation processes in three strategic ecosystems along the main channel of the Colombian Amazon River. Currently, she supports the development of these initiatives by strengthening the social networks that sustain them, favoring the participatory environmental governance component in the project's implementation. Additionally, she has been documenting the memory, knowledge, and good practices of these community conservation experiences of aquatic ecosystems in the Colombian Amazon, fostering self-reflection, projection, and exchange of experiences among the connected initiatives.