By Kopila Thapa, WOCAN Member and Gender Specialist
‘I motivate other women in my village to change crops to adapt the climate change effects’- Ms. Siyat Chey, Women Farmer from Cambodia. Her dedication on Climate Smart-Agriculture was really praise worthy. She shared her Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) farming experiences in workshop, organized in Bangkok, Thailand on 11-12 Dec 2013. The workshop was jointly organized by ASEAN, WOCAN, GIZ, and FAO in which 40 participants were participated from 20 different countries representing from development interventions partners, research institutes, non-governmental organization, civil society and agriculture sectors.
The main objectives of the workshop were to develop concrete recommendations and actions for ASEAN to include gender, to promote a common understanding of the linkages between gender and impact on climate change and to share gender-sensitive climate smart practices from the Asian Region.
The methods of session of workshop were presentation, experiences sharing, group exercises and participatory approaches. All the sessions were discussed and presented from the gender perspective. Panel discussions, individual presentation and CARAVAN sessions were included in the workshop. The discussion was very meaningful and useful for developing the CSA from the gender perspective including the women who are producing the food for the family, probably they don’t use the advance technology, but their knowledge is very useful for CSA. Since they are using the traditional knowledge and technology, women friendly agriculture tools are needed for making the CSA agriculture more gender sensitive. The group presentation and session was quite interesting. There were six different researchers who led the group and shared their finding. The researches were from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Cambodia.
On the second day session ‘CARAVAN’ was quite interesting. The participants had to discusse on the three steps of project cycle management: 1) integrate gender in ASSESSMENT and project DESIGN, 2) implementation and M&E and 3) Governance, awareness and capacity-building. Very good and informative information were generated from the participations. For example: for governance and awareness, the participants highlighted evidence based advocacy.
The outcome of the issues was a concrete recommendations and actions of short and medium term to include in the multi-sector ASEAN Framework on Climate Change (AFCC), shared the gender-sensitive best practice, success stories, methodology and policies for tackling climate change related threats to the agriculture sector and food security and the most importantly, understanding the potential value to integrating gender concerns into agriculture and climate change adaption and mitigation policies of project from around the ASEAN region.
The workshop concluded by providing the future plan for 2014, 2015 and 2016+ by the participants representing from different organization. Field level to policy level participants was presented in the workshop. The most important thing was all the presentations, discussions and interactions was done from the gender prespective and concerned with women issues. However, there were some gaps and challenges were also discussed, such as the need to recognize women’s contributions, exchange of information on the Vientiane Declaration and development of coordination mechanisms.