This special edition of Joto Afrika provides insights and learning from the ‘Gender and Community-based Adaptation Learning Workshop’, held in Ghana in August 2011, which brought together 42 gender and community-based adaptation practitioners from 12 government, UN and civil society organisations in Ghana, Niger, Morocco, Kenya and Mozambique, as well as resource people from CARE International and IIED. Participants shared and discussed their knowledge and experience in gender and adaptation to climate change around two themes:
1. Recognizing and promoting the existing capacities and power of women and men in adapting to climate change and reducing vulnerability
2. Generating good practice principles and methods for integrating gender equality into CBA processes in Africa
Discussion revolved around how best to learn about the shifting gender and climate dynamics in any local context, and how to use this knowledge to support gender and power analysis as part of vulnerability analysis, facilitate gender sensitive community adaptation action planning, assess capacity and capacity gaps and identify community institutions to represent the concerns of the most vulnerable. Some of the key recommendations emerging from the workshop include:
• Develop capacity building programs, which emphasize the vision, value and importance of gender-responsive CBA and climate change
• Recognize that gender is not an ‘add- on’, but a requirement for adaptation planning
• Conduct gender and power analysis prior to adaptation planning to ensure knowledge of the existing power dynamics and capacities among and between men and women and the drivers of why and how power relationships, behaviors and norms change in the communities they work with.
• Understand the drivers of change in gender roles and relations and examine how power dynamics are shifting due to the pressures and stresses of climate change.
• Tailor Community-based adaptation methods and tools based on knowledge of the local context as well as climate information, to ensure they respond to gender dynamics, realities of change, risk and uncertainty.