On 21 July 2025, Bogotá became the meeting point for women-led organizations, human rights defenders, and grassroots leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Convened by the ToGETHER program, the South-South Exchange Tejidos de Esperanza created a space for dialogue, knowledge-sharing, and collective action around community-based humanitarian shelters with a gender perspective.

This hybrid event brought together transformative experiences from Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mexico, and Colombia, highlighting the role of community shelters as essential spaces for resistance, care, and protection in contexts of humanitarian crisis.

Shelters that heal and protect

In a world marked by forced displacement, armed conflict, and natural disasters, community-led humanitarian shelters have become vital spaces of protection and dignity. The exchange highlighted transformative experiences such as the City of Joy in the DRC, humanitarian protection initiatives in Bangladesh, Mexico’s migrant shelter networks, and Colombian community shelters like San Sebastián and Casa Ruth.

These testimonies underscored the essential role of women’s leadership in shaping shelters not only as places of safety but also as hubs for collective healing, intercultural dialogue, and risk management strategies rooted in local realities.

Building networks acroos the Global South

Through panels, participatory workshops, and open dialogues, participants identified common challenges, including limited sustainable funding, fragmented public policies, and the insufficient recognition of community shelters in institutional responses. At the same time, they also reaffirmed the strengths of South-South cooperation: peer-to-peer learning, recognition of ancestral knowledge, and solidarity among communities facing similar realities.

As one of the participants stated:

“What we wove here is not just a network of collaboration,
it is a political and ethical pact for dignified life and women’s leadership in times of crisis.”

Tejidos de Esperanza Declaration

The event concluded with the collective reading of the “Tejidos de Esperanza Declaration”, a political and ethical manifesto that:

• Recognizes community shelters as transformative mechanisms of protection, empowerment, and healing.
• Denounces the insufficiency of institutional responses, fragmented public policies, and funding gaps, particularly in Bangladesh, Mexico, and Colombia.
• Reaffirms commitments to gender justice, interculturality, community-based risk management, and local leadership.
• Proposes the creation of a Global South Shelter Network and the development of a participatory regional protocol to articulate territorial experiences and promote common ethical, political, and cultural standards of protection.
• Calls on states, humanitarian agencies, and international donors to provide sustainable resources and respect for the autonomy of community-led initiatives.

Read the Tejidos de Esperanza Declaration here:

The complete event report is now available here: