2019 Student Engagement Finalist: Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, Argentina

Learning sustainability with vicuñas in the Andes

This project began in 2011. Vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna) are wild camelids that live in the altiplano of the Andes, in areas of indigenous communities that have subsistence economies. The vicuñas have one of the finest fibres in the world which condemned them to risk of extinction by hunting in the middle of the 20th century. With vicuñas populations recovered after decades of conservation, this project rescues the prehispanic way of use them with Chakus. The chaku is an ancestral vicuña capture technique for shearing their fibre and release them back to nature. To perform Chakus a fluent transcultural knowledge dialogues between scientists, students and local indigenous people is needed to reach success. The experience intercultural learning and wildlife management. This also help them as future biologist and agronomists to feel the reality of the work with animals in this particular biocultural landscape.

Top 3 learnings:

1. We conserve vicunas through sustainable use
2. We involve students in working with native animals with ancestral techniques
3. We teach students the importance of intercultural knowledge dialogue for working with local communities

What it means to win

“The National University of Jujuy, is located territorially in an Andean province with a great cultural diversity. The students experience the vicuñas conservation and management within the framework of environmental science and this is a way in which the university prepares professionals rooted in their own environmental and cultural reality.”

Lic Rodolfo Tecchi
Rector