Across the Americas Afro-descendant women have played a fundamental role in the care economy, production, and community economics, and their contributions are impacted by racism and gender inequality (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean [ECLAC] & United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA], 2020). Approximately 200 million people of African descent live across the Americas (United Nations, n.d.). Latin America and the Caribbean is home to an estimated 153.3 million Afro-descendants, representing 23.7 percent of the region’s population (UNFPA, 2025, p. 3).
To counter business exclusion, Black diaspora women have been engaging in a plurality of economic systems through member-owned institutions (MOIs). These MOIs are the antidote to combat persistent forms of colonialism, racism, sexism, and structural violence. The 1991 Constitution and Law 70 of 1993 of Colombia does recognize Black communities as collective rights-holders, including rights to territorial ownership, cultural identity, and participation. These advances on paper have been undermined by a counter-reform and it limits Black people’s rights due to inadequate regulation, weak state protection, extractivism, dispossession, and targeted violence (Palacios Valencia, 2022). As a result, Afro-Colombians have had to rely on their ancestral knowledges of alternative and cooperative economic systems because mainstream capitalistic business are just elitist and exclusionary.
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