Global Climate Change Alliance African projects meet in Rwanda: awards for Comoros and Tanzania
date: 10/03/2020
Over 20 GCCA+ projects shared their results in a ‘Market Place’ of stalls that presented the successes, challenges and impacts of work in the field. Eye-catching handmade leather products, including footballs and high fashion handbags, contributed to Tanzania winning the award for Best Market Stall. ‘The communities have already adapted to activities that increase the resilience of climate change adaptation. They are now making leather goods as alternative sources of income,’ said Francis B. Njau from the GCCA+ Tanzania EcoACT project. The items are made mainly by women and youth groups who have benefited from the creation of a leather factory near Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, in Idifu village.
The GCCA+ Communication Award recognised the increasing importance of awareness in the fight against climate change and was won by GCCA+ Comoros for its creation of seven short films and a comic strip featuring a typical Comorian family. ‘The videos are part of a wider publicity campaign using radio, the internet and local newspapers,’ said Mohammed Ali Mlazahane, GCCA+ Project Director for Comoros. ‘We wanted to attract the attention of the entire population. We wanted to get people to link their everyday actions with climate change. A lot of them don’t really understand climate change and how it relates to how they live day to day.’
Strong engagement with the Government of Rwanda was key to the success of the conference, which was attended by over 100 project managers, EU Delegation focal points and representatives of international, regional and national institutions and organisations, civil society, the GCCA+ Support Facility and conference partner IUCN. In his speech opening the conference, Rwanda’s Minister for Environment Vincent Biruta gave examples of climate-smart development in Africa, such as reduced dependence upon biomass for cooking, water catchment management and border-to-border landscape restoration.
On the final day, participants travelled out of the capital to meet local communities in the Rulindo district, who are benefiting from government-organised programmes to parcel land and encourage cooperative approaches to agriculture and land management, planting 600 eucalyptus trees together with the local community.
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