Global Water Partnership - GWP

Meeting women’s climate change needs in Cameroon’s National Action Plan 

An interim evaluation of Cameroon’s National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (NAP) presented GWP Cameroon with an opportunity to advocate for the needs of women and other vulnerable groups to be included in the plan, to ensure they have the knowledge required to adapt their activities in the face of climate change. 

In 2022, five years after the NAP was implemented, GWP Cameroon collaborated with the Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainable Development (MINEPDED) to review and update it. MINEPDED and GWP Cameroon organised a workshop in February 2022 during which relevant stakeholders contributed to an end-of-phase evaluation report on the plan and gave their views on changes they felt were required.  

Their discussions were informed by feedback from an earlier consultation with stakeholders, coordinated jointly by GWP Cameroon and MINEPDED, to assess implementation of the seven priority areas of the NAP during its first phase. This revealed the lack of a sustainable funding mechanism for the activities set out in the plan, impacting on its implementation. It also revealed little awareness of the NAP among stakeholders and beneficiaries. Discussions at the workshop aimed to ensure that the updated NAP addressed these weaknesses and built on the strengths of the first implementation phase. 

IWRM and EWS concept note approved 

In 2022, a year after approving a pre-concept note, the Adaptation Fund approved the final concept note for the ‘Integrated Water Resource Management and Early Warning System for Climate Resilience in the Lake Chad Basin’ project. The concept note was informed by feedback from regional stakeholders at a consultation workshop organised jointly by the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), GWP Central Africa, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in February 2022. 

GWP Central Africa has been working with the LCBC and WMO on the project since 2016. It aims to strengthen climate resilience in the Lake Chad basin, promote better management of water resources, and reduce the impacts of climate-related risks such as flooding. It also promotes inclusiveness, with users within the basin being actively involved in ensuring proposed solutions meet their needs. To facilitate this, the three organisations carried out a deeper analysis of beneficiaries’ needs, including consulting within the five countries of the Lake Chad basin to support an environmental and social impact assessment of the project. 

Supporting community-level training to promote environmental awareness in the Lake Chad basin 

GWP Central Africa collaborated with the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Chad in June 2022 to train representatives of non-governmental organisations and civil society organisations from the countries of the Lake Chad basin so that they in turn could offer community-level training to raise environmental awareness in their own countries.  

The training took place during a capacity-building workshop organised within the framework of the Lake Chad Management Improvement Support Project. One of the project’s aims is to create an enabling environment for implementing the LCBC Strategic Action Program. This includes strengthening the capacity of stakeholders and promoting a participatory approach to managing natural resources in the basin to ensure that they are managed in a sustainable manner. 

GWP Central Africa’s training at the workshop aimed to harmonise training methodologies used by participants to ensure expected outcomes were achieved. GWP Central Africa also trained participants on gender and Communication for Development (C4D) so that they could capitalise on these themes in their own community-level training sessions. Participants developed a single training matrix to use during their training and also devised tools for monitoring and evaluating the training sessions.