What's Right? Development and Access to Capital for Indigenous Peoples

2. Indigenous Peoples

There is little debate that Indigenous groups face systematic challenges in terms of addressing poverty, overcoming economic developmental challenges and increasing the standard of living within Aboriginal communities. Bruijin and Whiteman (2010), for example, outline the growing body of literature that address issues of multinational companies and Indigenous peoples as well as how this impacts community, economic and business development from an identity perspective.

As described the Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in a 2004 workshop on data collection and disaggregation for Indigenous peoples by the United Nations, considerable thinking and debate have been devoted to the question of defining ‘Indigenous peoples’, but no such definition has yet been adopted by any United Nations system body (UNESCO 2010).