Who we are
The Fundação Grupo Esquel Brasil – Esquel Brazil – is part of an international network of autonomous non-governmental organizations focused on strengthening democracy to overcome the problems of poverty and social inequalities in Latin America.
The work in recent years has consolidated Esquel Brazil as a center for knowledge sharing and production in strategic areas for Sustainable Development, none of which would be possible without the participation and support of its partners and the privilege of working with them.
OurHistory
The idea of creating Grupo Esquel came about in the late 1970s among friends and fellow exiles with a desire to contribute to sustainable development and solidarity in Latin America. Its name is a reference to the city of Esquel in southern Patagonia, chosen to symbolize the group’s aim of emphasizing and empowering a vision of the world from the South.
The founders of the Esquel Group were further inspired by the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report – Our Common Future – the first global United Nations report to introduce the concept of sustainable development, which means combining poverty eradication, wealth redistribution, gender equity and environmental protection/ preservation with economic growth, to ensure a dignified life for future generations.
In Brazil, the Foundação Grupo Esquel Brasil was formally founded in 1989. Recognizing that Brazil’s Northeast concentrates two of the great challenges to sustainable development – extreme poverty and environmental degradation (which was not widely recognized at the time, when policies focused on fighting drought) – the Esquel Foundation took on the Northeast as the geographical core of its work.
Esquel as an organization has made important contributions to strategic sustainable development issues in Brazil over the last 30 years, including these key achievements:
(1) In 1990, it helped raise the issue of climate change and the threat of desertification in Brazil’s semi-arid region;
(2) It was a founding member of GIFE and a member of its Ethics and Fiscal Board;
(3) It played a strategic role in drafting the Bill of Law that established the OSCIPs – Civil Society Organizations in the Public Interest;
(4) It was one of the main authors of the PAN – National Plan to Combat Desertification;
(5) It contributed to the formation of the Brazilian Semi-Arid Alliance (ASA) and was at the forefront of drawing up the operational plan for the One Million Cisterns in the Semi-Arid Program (P1MC), which became an international award-winning public policy that transformed the reality of the semi-arid region;
(6) It worked for over 20 years as a strategic advisor to the Children’s Pastoral, one of the largest and most successful civil society initiatives on behalf of children aged 0-6;
(7) For decades, the FGEB has been a member of FBOMS – the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for the Environment and Sustainable Development, a broad alliance of Brazilian organizations and social movements founded in 1990, having housed the FBOMS Executive Secretariat and served on the FBOMS National Coordinating Board;
(8) The Esquel Foundation became a benchmark in the social technology of Revolving Solidarity Funds (RSF), having worked since 2003 with the Vencer Juntos (Winning Together) Program to support productive income-generating projects and promote these funds, initially in partnership with the Children’s Pastoral, fostering more than 800 solidarity economy enterprises and 11 RSFs by 2018. The Vencer Juntos methodology was certified as a social technology by the Banco do Brasil Foundation in 2013;
(9) It is the creator and one of the leading organizations behind the Platform for a New Regulatory Framework for relations between the government and civil society.