Ecumenical coalition participating in the World Social Forum

NAIROBI, Kenia, January 19, 2007

The CCAA/Caritas platform is coordinating a great variety of joint workshops, ecumenical worship services and Taxi Heathrow Airport other events in Nairobi, as well as an ecumenical pavilion in which groups related to the churches can share, coordinate and put forward their concerns, perceptions and work.

The objective is the affirming of a visible and meaningful ecumenical presence, and contribution to the forum. The platform is supported by a worldwide ecumenical coalition headed by the World Council of Churches (WCC).

At the forum, the WCC and its associates have different events organized on:

• Wealth, poverty and ecology: This workgroup describes poverty as being a direct result of the creation and distribution of wealth, and hunger, illness and suffering as being the reverse of hiper-consumerism and hiper-development, and is considering alternative means for distributing wealth.

• Agriculture for life: Small farmers are being encouraged to practice organic or ecological farming, so that they continue to be a world agricultural forum in the service of life, as an alternative to business agriculture and the so-called “green revolution.”

• Water, the environment and climate changes: International and African participants are debating over strategies to find alternative solutions to the water crisis and climate change, and are lobbying the human right to water before governments and the forces of civil society.

• Ecological debt: Because of having ravaged the South’s natural resources and destroyed its means of subsistence, the industrialized countries of the North have an ecological debt with the peoples of the South. Monographic studies of Africa, Asia and Latin America illustrate the consequences of this debt and answer the question, “Who owes who, and how much?”

• The “responsibility for protecting”: The putting into place of this new international norm. If the population is at great risk and its governments are not protecting it, the international community is responsible for doing so. How are the churches facing these issues, in which they have an important role of prevention, assistance, healing and reconciliation?

An ecumenical coalition participated in the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, and since then has been present in each subsequent gathering. What are the ecumenical groups looking for in the WSF? “Up until now the space the WSF represents has been contentious, but it has offered groups and organizations an opportunity to build synergies and strategies in common,” according to Dr. Rogate Mshana of Tanzania, who is responsible for the WCC’’s program for economic justice.

Mshana sees that in addition to the information, analysis, publicizing and establishing of contacts, the WSF offers opportunities for undertaking future joint actions. The networks and organizations are being asked to prepare proposals for actions on one of the 21 “themes that can be tackled.” These proposals are to be signed by a minimum of three organizations. On Tuesday, January 23, the fourth day of the forum, all of the proposals will be presented in one of the five “forums for struggles, alternatives and actions,” at which time other groups can also subscribe themselves.

The members of the 2007 world ecumenical coalition present at the WSF are, the Conference of Churches of All Africa (CCAA), APRODEV, the Ecumenical Forum of Brazil, Caritas Internationalis, the International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity, the Ecumenical Alliance of World Action, Frontier Internship in Mission, Koinonia, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), Pax Romana, the World Reformed Alliance, the World Council of Churches, the Universal Federation of Christian Student Movements, the YWCA and the YMCA.