Where: Meghalaya State, India
Solutions: Climate Adaptation and resilience, Capacity-building, Women and gender-responsive actions
India Water Foundation (IWF) has enhanced climate and livelihood resilience through collaboration with a variety of partners to increase sustainable funding, development assistance, capacity building, etc. They highlighted the broad contours of Forests and Biodiversity, Water Resources, Sustainable Agriculture, Energy, Mining, Crosscutting areas and Climate Change Adaptation, Knowledge Management and Skill Development through women-centric perspective.
Under the Constitution of India, land and water resources are administered at the local level which in the Meghalaya State, is made up of largely indigenous/tribal people. The Meghalaya state is also a matrilineal society, with women taking a main role in running households. However, their leadership and empowerment was shallow in running the financial wheels of the economy due to absence of entrepreneurship culture, institutional support, economic and financial barriers. To bring socio-eco-cultural change, IWF made propounding efforts and encouraged participation of women and indigenous tribes to be inclusive and resilient by transforming them into entrepreneurs.
Capacity Building of women and indigenous tribes was poor due to low capabilities, weak institutional-funding/political mechanisms, inability to diversify to other livelihood activities and lack of access to adequate resources to enable the community to recover from climate shocks. IWF empowered them as active “partners” and not as passive “beneficiaries”. They promoted cross-linkages of water missions with forestry missions to help rejuvenate local water capacity, se-quester GHG emission and empower entrepreneurial capacities. Motivating communities through knowledge exchange, awareness, and partnerships to augment their requisite skill sets, created valuable assets for themselves and enhanced the spirit of ‘entrepreneurship capacity’.
Photo provided by India Water Foundation
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