ABSTRACT
The Indigenous youth in the Amazon region are facing new challenges brought by education and city life. The young Shipibo people want to access university and higher education institutions. They face different academic, economic, and cultural challenges. There have not been, until recently, state policies or programs to support the Indigenous students in Peru. Apparently, these may not be culturally adequate due to the lack of an intercultural perspective. The same could be said about the different programs and initiatives developed in the last decades by Peruvian universities and higher education institutions. At the same time, civil society associations such as NGOs and Indigenous organizations have been more proactive and more preoccupied by the challenges faced by Indigenous students. The most successful institutions have been those organized by the Indigenous youth themselves. The different Shipibo youth associations created since the 1970s constitute an interesting example of what Indigenous young people can do for themselves and for other Indigenous students.
