Meet Lida Medina, Indigenous entrepreneur from Vaupés, Colombia. For years, she and the women of her territory occupied a secondary place in community life, with most of their roles centred on domestic work and limited participation in public spaces. One day, she realized that the change she was waiting for needed to come from within, and so she proposed something radically different: What if the women of her community came together, formed an association, and took ownership of their futures?

Born in Putumayo, Colombia, BioIncos co-founder Yuli Rodríguez has pride in the territory that raised her and the opportunity to create dignified work among the biodiversity that exists there. When they first started BioIncos and began sourcing cacay from local communities to transform it into a natural oil, very few producers believed they had a valuable product that others would be willing to purchase. Read their story here.

This video brings together testimonies from leaders in the sociobioeconomy who have participated in key climate and finance forums, such as COP30 in Belém, with support from NESsT. Grounded in lived experience, these leaders’ perspectives highlight why their presence is essential in spaces where far-reaching decisions are made.

COP30, held in Brazil and hosted in the Amazon for the first time, marked a turning point in global discussions on climate and development. Against this backdrop, NESsT has been working more intentionally to bring local realities from the Amazon into global debates around access to financing. We spoke with Cairo Bastos, Program Manager at NESsT Brazil, about his key takeaways from Belém, what it takes in practice to build development models rooted in local territories, and why financing for the Amazon is a topic that concerns taxpayers and citizens more broadly.

Across the Amazon, Indigenous Peoples, Black communities, riverine populations, and other traditional groups are leading enterprises that generate dignified livelihoods, strengthen local economies, and safeguard ancestral ways of life — all while keeping the forest standing. 

Indigenous Peoples remain largely underrepresented in global decision-making spaces — revealing a contradiction between their leading role in protecting nature and their absence from the forums where environmental and economic policies are defined. This exclusion is no coincidence: it reflects historical, linguistic, financial, and political barriers that limit the access of those who live in and protect the territories to the tables where the future of biodiversity and the economy is decided.

Today, only a small share of the credit offered by financial institutions reaches those who protect the forest. If governments and multilateral organizations work together to change this, sustainable businesses can thrive — and so can the Amazon. 

Many community-based enterprises in emerging sustainable socio-bioeconomy value chains lack the means and infrastructure to adopt digital monitoring and communication tools to track forest conservation and improve their production processes. With support from Cisco Foundation, in 2021, NESsT launched a search for early-stage technology enterprises that provide sustainable livelihoods to underserved communities and regenerate the environment. Read more about the initiative learnings here.

Our work on the ground in Brazil’s Amazon region has consistently shown that increasing women's participation is critical for the socio-bioeconomy to become a robust and sustainable national development strategy. 

In this blog, we speak with bioeconomy entrepreneurs to better understand the challenges they face when applying for funding from multiple sources. Read it now to learn how complex application criteria and reporting demands impact their businesses and explore actionable recommendations for how the funding community can help ensure more equitable, inclusive access to financing. 

NESsT’s recent study and extensive research identifies that the term ‘bioeconomy’ is often broadly interpreted by bioeconomy funders and global policymakers, sometimes straying far from a vision of environmental stewardship. We interviewed Indigenous leaders and entrepreneurs as part of ongoing efforts to deepen our understanding of their perspectives, vision and expectations of the bioeconomy as not just as an economic model, but as a way of life rooted deeply in ancestral tradition.  

This blog delves into the methodology behind NESsT’s publication to improve the targeting, accessibility, efficacy, and efficiency of investments in the Amazon bioeconomy; it homes in on NESsT’s firm intention to bring local voices to global discussions around Amazon bioeconomy funding and explores how NESsT anchored the publication in authentic narratives and diverse Amazonian contexts while tailoring the message for the international financing community.