WUNRN
KENYA - TAKING THE DOHA CLIMATE
CHANGE CONFERENCE TO KENYA RURAL COMMUNITIES - WOMEN
- The skyscraper Qatari capital city of
But
the agriculturalist-cum-sociologist has come here to the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to
the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), thanks
to funding from the Mary
Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice (MRFCJ), to sit and
listen as scientists, researchers, top government officials and activists argue
their case.
Kibe is on a mission – to
gather as much knowledge as possible to share with the women in her community.
Turkana district was one of the hardest-hit areas in the Horn of Africa in the
2011 drought that affected the entire region.
According to Oxfam International,
Turkana district has gone without good rain for about five years. And this has
affected the community severely. In 2011 the United Nations news agency IRIN
reported “Turkana has experienced malnutrition rates of up to 37.4 percent; the
highest recorded in 20 years and more than double the U.N. World Health
Organization emergency threshold of 15 percent.”
Back in Turkana district, Kibe
runs an information-sharing network that she started because she refused to
allow herself and the other women in her village to continue suffering from
hunger as they repeatedly lost their crops in the prolonged drought.
“Most women in African rural
communities still attribute the impact of climate change to different myths,
including that God is upset with people,” Kibe told IPS.
“I work with 4,000 champions
(women) who educate their fellow community members and help them come up with
adaptation strategies,” she said. She named her organisation Kenya Climate
Justice Women Champions, and has now expanded her network to benefit over 3,000
households.
“In turn the women identify
their areas of need and, based on the information I get from international
conferences such as this one, we start projects that address those challenges,”
said Kibe. The projects are funded by MRFCJ.
She said that often the
information from conferences such as COP 18 does not filter down to the people
most affected by climate change.
“We need to get the information
from this conference to help them understand what exactly is happening,” said
Kibe.
Top of Kibe’s priority list of
things to tackle is food insecurity. And the cultivation of cassava, a drought-tolerant
crop, has been identified as part of the strategy to combat this. Previously
people in Kibe’s area grew maize, which often failed because of the lack of
rain.
Another priority is addressing
water insecurity, Kibe said. Back home, women and children have to travel long
distances to fetch water, which in many cases is contaminated.
“We have introduced solar water
cleaning, which is a technology that uses a device that easily purifies water
when placed in the sun,” explained Kibe. “It’s just a press of a button.”
Women are also encouraged to
plant five trees each to combat carbon emissions.
What Kibe is doing is
important. According to Trish Glazebrook, a researcher from the
She told IPS that women in sub-Saharan
Africa are not only victims of climate change, but are also contributing to
pollution because they lack the technology to improve their farming methods and
remain heavily dependent on agriculture, a sector that contributes to global
emissions.
But Robinson, who was the first
female president of
“A lot of rural women like
Cecilia are doing a lot of work on the ground to adapt, but they are hardly
recognised and they work with limited resources,” Robinson said.
Speaking at the first ever
Gender Day at COP 18 on Nov. 27, Robinson called for more active participation
of women in the conference. For more than 10 years gender organisations have
advocated aggressively for this day to be recognised in the climate negotiation
process.
“We need gender balance in all
the UNFCCC bodies, including the attendance,” she said.
Christiana Figueres, executive
secretary of the UNFCCC, concurred.
“It’s very dumb not to maximise
the participation of a group that is over 50 percent of the world population,”
she said.
She said she was proud that the
gender text was included in the UNFCCC process, although the words needed to be
transformed into action.
Mozambican Minister of
Environment Acinda Abreu said that society as a whole needed a mind shift to
allow women to make meaningful contributions at all levels of the climate
change process.
“Adaptation strategies should
prioritise the farmers, particularly women who are mainly into subsistence
agriculture, and the communities they live in,” she said.
The special advisor at the International Union
for Conservation of Nature, Francois Rogers, told IPS that women
from all walks of life have to be adequately trained to give them the capacity
to participate in policy-formulation processes at the local, regional and
international levels.
“It should not be just about
meeting quotas, but we should ensure that they have confidence in understanding
the issues so that they can fully participate in the decision making,” he said.