December 12, 2018
By Stacey Kimmig and Ayuska Motha
During the second week of COP24 here in Katowice, the Women and Gender Constituency held the 4th Gender Just Climate Solutions Award Ceremony. The Gender Just Solutions Awards are awarded to three types of projects; 1) the best technical, 2) the best non-technical and 3) the best transformational climate solutions. The winning projects aim to alleviate women’s workload, empower women, promote women’s democratic rights and participation, are locally led, and can be easily scaled-up. The winners each receive 2,000 EUR.
This year’s transformational category winner is Dorothee Lisenga (CFLEDD) based in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). CFLEDD work to promote dialogues between local, indigenous women and the customary chiefs of villages and provincial authorities in order to secure land rights for women, thereby reducing deforestation. Traditionally women could not inherit land from their husbands in the DRC and 70% did not have access to land titles. Now, through Dorothee’s work, land and forest rights have been guaranteed for women of 2 provinces, leading to increased decision making power of the women in forest management policies and decreased deforestation. www.cfleddcom.wordpress.com
The winner of the technical solution category is Trupti Jain of Naireeta Services in India. The Bhungroo technology she works with protects the groundwater via a filtration system and increases soil fertility by reducing salinity. The technology allows rains during rainy seasons to be funneled into a storage area to be used for irrigation during the dry season. The project trains women farmers to be climate leaders who promote the technology and deliver fee-based agriculture expert advice. The co-ownership model has facilitated access to irrigation and farming facilities to smallholders, ensuring food security and income generation. www.naireetaservices.com
In the non-technical solution category, Clive Chibule of the Green Living Movement was awarded the prize for training 537 women in Zambia on leadership and climate resilience. Women farmers reproduce their own seeds, breed livestock, have planted over 35,000 trees and created 250 vegetable gardens. This has enabled them to increase their income and make them less dependent on rain-fed harvests in an area adversely affected by climate change. The project has improved the adaptive capacity of farmer households to adverse impacts of climate change. www.glmglobal.org
FAWCO supported the Gender Just Climate Solutions by volunteering to help to judge the projects to identify the winners. Please see the following link for the brochure which lists the 3 winning projects in more detail, as well as a descriptions of a selection of 6-8 submitted projects per category. The projects are diverse, creative and effective climate solutions demonstrating that small, community led initiatives can have long-term, far-reaching impacts. www.womengenderclimate.org