A tailor-made action plan to deal with climate change

Communities and leaders of the Koulikoro region in western Mali now have an updated action plan to deal with climate shocks and extremes, thanks to a successful outreach campaign completed as part of the Waati Yelema Labenw project.

The new action plan is the result of several consultations and dialogue sessions with communities, with the aim of capturing snapshots of the situation of participating villages and establishing better resilience planning.

The outreach, which kicked off in June 2018, enabled the community to identify their own priorities. It was the last phase of the economic, social and cultural development program preparation.

A “participatory diagnosis”, it involved people from all walks of life in communities, including communal advisors.

With this process completed, the team has now just started restitution meetings with the communities and leaders of 10 communes in the project areas - Koulikoro, Ségou and Mopti. Restitution meetings are platforms during which communities and communal leaders present the priorities they have identified and validate their inclusion in the climate action plans.

COMMUNITY PRIORITIES

Communities had previously spontaneously developed initiatives of all kinds to enhance their resilience in the areas of agriculture, livestock and forestry.

However, the ad hoc nature of the initiatives came short of a strong adaptation plan to climate shocks, said Tchêfolo Diarra, a 30-years-old farmer in the Banamba commune.

"We had a specific method of using compost, but after the training initiated by the project, we realized that this method was not bad, but was not effective in achieving our goals,” he said. “We understood that it was … more astute to adapt our techniques to our realities".

ACTION PLAN UPDATE

The Waati Yelema Labenw project intended to involve the communities early on so as to bring in participants for the “integration phase”, with the goal of allowing them to adopt the steer the project in a direction of their liking.

Participants, we hope, will now be able to become more engaged citizens, including by calling elected officials to account as they measure their actions against the redeveloped plan, which serves as a yardstick. Good governance will follow, we hope.

With solid foundations now in place, there is growing optimism of more robust interaction between communities and municipal authorities, including when it comes to climate-risk management and access to sources of financing.

Dioumawoye Natou Sangho is a Mali-based communication and public relations specialist for Blumont.