On 20 Sept, WOCAN conducted a consultative meeting with grassroots women leaders and development partners for the Women’s Carbon Standard (WCS) method development in Kathmandu, Nepal. The 17 participants represented the women’s NGOs and cooperatives, financial institute, carbon project developers and WOCAN Nepal partners. The purpose of this consultative meeting was to gather information from potential stakeholders – especially grassroots women leaders on:
a) Which impacts related to the WCS six domains women stakeholders would value the most,
b) How we could channel funding to women stakeholders to ensure that the activities that deliver the impacts can be financed,
c) How we could monitor that funds have arrived, activities implemented and impacts created, and
d) Discuss the simplest institutional arrangement that would be necessary to implement this.
During the discussion on setting the baseline and impact identification, the grassroots women leaders, all of whom are biogas user, emphasized time and health as the two main domains impacted by the use of biogas. Time and income are the impacts that tend to enable the other impacts of education, leadership and food security. Only health seems to have a strong intrinsic relationship to the project intervention. Other topics such as quantification of impact and institutional arrangement were also discussed.
The consultation concluded by identifying two next steps, pilot project and method development. Pilot project will be developed in coordination with Women Leaders, Alternative Energy Promotion Center (AEPC) and International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). South Pole will proceed with the method development for the domain of Time, as the primary impact, and then work with indirect benefits of income and assets, education and leadership.