Ecumenical Coalition to Participate in 7th World Social Forum

Ceremonies in Nairobi's Holy Family Roman Catholic Basilica and All Saints Anglican Cathedral and a procession are part of events being organised by the All Africa Conference of Churches/Caritas Ecumenical Platform to mark the opening of the 7th World Social Forum (WSF).

With the theme "People's struggles, people's alternatives", this year's WSF takes place in Africa for the first time, in Nairobi, Kenya, between 20 and 25 January 2007.

The AACC/Caritas platform is coordinating a broad range of joint workshops, ecumenical worship services, and other events in Nairobi as well as providing for an ecumenical pavilion where church-related groups will be able to share, coordinate and show-case their concerns, insights and work.

The goal is to ensure a visible and meaningful ecumenical presence at and contribution to the forum; the platform is being supported by a global ecumenical coalition of organisations led by the World Council of Churches (WCC).

At the forum, the WCC and its partners will organise different events on:

• wealth, poverty and ecology: to profile poverty as the direct result of wealth creation and distribution, and hunger, disease and suffering as the reverse side of over-consumption and over-development, and to explore alternative ways of distributing wealth;

• life-giving agriculture: small farmers who practise organic/ecological agriculture will be encouraged to continue building a global life-giving agriculture forum as an alternative to corporate agriculture and the so-called "green revolution";

• water, environment and climate change: international and African actors will discuss strategies to look for alternative solutions to the water crisis and climate change, and to promote the human right to water with governments and civil society actors;

• ecological debt: because they have plundered the south's natural resources and destroyed its sources of sustenance, northern industrialised countries are in ecological debt to the peoples of the south. Case studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America will illustrate the impacts of this debt, and answer the question "who owes whom, and how much?"; and

• the "responsibility to protect": under this emerging international standard, if populations are at severe risk and their governments are not protecting them, the international community has a responsibility for doing so. How do churches - which play an important role in prevention, assistance, healing and reconciliation - deal with these issues?

Members of the 2007 global ecumenical coalition at the WSF include the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), APRODEV, Brazil Ecumenical Forum, Caritas Internationalis, International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity (CIDSE), Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EAA), Frontier Internship in Mission, Koinonia, Lutheran World Federation (LWF), Pax Romana, World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), World Council of Churches, World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), the YWCA and YMCA.