Story, Louvier Kindo Tombe
A 2-day training workshop on gender responsive climate change adaptation actions held in Yaoundé from August 27 to 28, 2024 at the head office of the Special Council Support Fund for Mutual Assistance – FEICOM. This event, organized by ICLEI Africa was part of the Bridge project, aimed at strengthening the capacities of knowledge brokers in Cameroon for inclusive planning, project development, and financing of local and gender-responsive adaptation actions.
“The idea of this participatory workshop is for the different actors to build a common understanding and a strategy to unlock quality climate finance for municipalities in Cameroon,” says, Lucy Lavirotte, Senior Specialist: Climate Change, Energy, and resilience at ICLEI – Africa.
She was speaking at the end of the workshop that brought together over 30 knowledge brokers, selected from local NGOs and consultancies.
Staff from FEICOM, municipalities, government officials, NGOs, technical and financial partners like GIZ, attended the training.
Climate financing has a very large diversity of actors that are involved and who have different understanding and different approach of climate finance.
The ICLEI workshop aimed at identifying key climate change actors in Cameroon and improves discussions on financing for climate change adaptation and sustainable development.
It was also an opportunity to refine the most appropriate mechanisms to unlock financing for locally-led and gender-responsive adaptation actions.
The workshop came after a series of webinars and other activities of the BRIDGE project that were launched last year September.
Responding to questions from Journalists on why focus on municipalities, Ms Lucy Lavirotte said “that’s where we think there is most impact. If we involve local communities and governments, we think that adaptation projects are going to be of a very quality that is actually going to respond to people’s needs”.
“That’s why they need to be inclusive in order to unlock more finance and quality finance that is gender responsive, that’s locally met.”
To match words with actions, the Yaounde IV Council in the Center region and the Kribi Council in the South region are ready to secure climate finance to implement their Climate Action Plan which they recently elaborated using participatory approaches.
FEICOM is a special and central actor in mobilizing and dispersing climate finance for local actions in Cameroon.
The Bridge project is receiving assistance from researchers from the University of Yaoundé 1 who are coordinating its research work, linking it to other resilience works underway in Cameroon.
