Climate change resilience: Lessons from the Braced program.
A regional workshop on resilience to climate change in the Sahel was held on July 24 and 25, 2019, in Dakar. For two days, participants discussed the achievements of the Braced program which is coming to an end.
Climate change represents a major risk factor in the Sahel region for chronic and acute food and nutritional crises, and has serious consequences for the region's poorest communities. To say that this phenomenon keeps communities in a trajectory of poverty and widens social inequalities. These challenges have forced the international community to engage in the implementation of policies and measures but also actions to improve the resilience of communities and ecosystems.
These efforts are supported by development partner initiatives aimed at strengthening resilience at different scales. This is the case with the Braced program carried out in Africa and Asia through 15 consortia including Enda. After five years of implementation, the program decided to share its knowledge and capitalize on its experiences in the conceptualization and operationalization of resilience. This is the whole meaning of the two-day regional workshop held in Dakar. An exercise in interaction with governmental and non-governmental structures working on initiatives to build resilience in the Sahel. This multi-stakeholder dialogue has a clear objective: to share the knowledge acquired by the Braced program, the life cycle of which ends in September 2019, with a view to promoting the appropriation of knowledge by the various resilience stakeholders.
The Executive Director of Enda Energie considers this workshop to be “the culmination of a process of learning about building and measuring resilience”. Indeed, the concept of resilience being very "all-encompassing" and very "complex", the Braced program has sought, over the last five years, to make it less scholarly through a learning process and a generation and of use of knowledge, according to Secou Sarr. This is how, according to him, notable progress has been recorded. “The program tried to approach the problem of resilience from different angles, notably talking about anticipation in relation to exogenous shocks, adaptation of communities and ecosystems but also absorption, that is to say the capacity of a system to get up after a shock. This is significant progress. There was also the compilation of evidence from the catalog of good practices for the construction of a framework in the field of resilience. All of these achievements deserve to be consolidated for continuity in action,” argued the Executive Director of Enda Energie.
Source : #Elhadji Ibrahima THIAM du Soleil
