Indigenous Peoples

The following post was submitted by Tom Pesek, Liaison Officer of the International Fund for Agricultural Development:

Speaking to participants at the 2009 Development Marketplace, it’s hard not to be optimistic about the future.  There are 100 finalists from nearly 50 countries here at the World Bank in Washington.  They are all participating in this year’s global grant competition, which is focused on climate adaptation.

These social entrepreneurs were selected from over 1,700 applicants.  Taken together, their projects represent “100 ideas to save the planet and its people from the effects of a changing climate.”  This may seem like quite a tall order, but among these innovators, no challenge seems too great.  In fact, one wonders how the DM jurors will manage to select which up to 25 project proposals most deserve to be funded.
  
Agriculture is where climate change, food security, and poverty reduction intersect.  In addressing the challenge of food security and climate change, we face the inter-related challenges of doubling food production by 2050, adapting agricultural productivity to shifting weather patterns, and minimizing agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, while maximizing its potential to mitigate climate change.  We will need substantial new resources, new ideas, and new ways of doing business to address these challenges.  

The International Fund for Agricultural Development believes that the Development Marketplace is an excellent platform for scouting and collecting new ideas from diverse sources, fostering innovative solutions, and developing partnerships in support of climate change adaptation.  (Photo of IFAD exhibit above.)  That’s why we were so pleased to be one of this year’s sponsor.  In addition to contributing to the grants, we will be offering our experience and technical advice to the winners over the next two years.

It's very important for all finalists to be at their booths by 10 o'clock Wednesday morning.  That's when the jurors will begin making their rounds and continue until 3 in the afternoon.

The jurors will go round in pairs.  Each finalist will be interviewed twice.

So, set your alarm, grab that coffee, or tea, or whatever, and get yourself to your booth on time.

And knock out those jurors.  They'll want to know all the technical stuff behind your project, but they'll be looking for your passion, too.  Show it!

The total award pool for winners in the DM2009 competition has risen to $4.86 million.  That means that Development Marketplace now expects to fund up to 24-25 projects among the nearly a hundred finalists from 47 countries.  Another $600,000 will directly benefit the finalists -- mainly the winners -- by supporting knowledge exchange, technical assistance, dissemination of results, and project evaluation.

The Global Environment Facility continues to be a major partner for DM, adding $2 million this year onto its previous $5.6 million given to past competitions.

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Visitors to the event, which opens tomorrow, Nov. 10, and continues to Friday, Nov. 13, will be able to video scenes from the floor and immediately upload their files with Flip cams that will be loaned out from the DM desk.  (DM communications leader Edie Smith tries out the pocket cam as the exhibition takes shape in the Atrium of the Main Complex of the World Bank Group.)

Some 28 million members of Indigenous Peoples live in Latin America, many of them in poverty and prone to flooding and other weather extremes caused or exacerbated by climate change.  A number of finalist projects aim to give Indigenous Peoples in Latin America a cushion against weather extremes.

Here's a sampling of the projects:

In Mexico, ITESM at Tecnologico de Monterrey seeks "to help people from Tutuaca, Otachique, and Conoachi communities in Chihuahua through a biocultural rescuing program to maintain native maize genetic diversity facing climate change needs, including validation and verification mechanisms to preserve their diverse maize races."

In Peru, an organization of women from four communities in the High Andean region proposes "to recover ancestral knowledge and techniques to mitigate the effects of cold spells, reducing the vulnerability of 2,758 comuneros belonging to 551 families in the district of Palca."

In El Savador, Instituto para en Rescate Ancestral Indigena Salvadoreno  (RAIS) seeks to "recover, divulge, and make people aware of the knowledge of 100 wise indigenous women regarding the properties and interpretation of the language of both climate and earth as a support tool to prevent climate-change risks."

The world's poor are those most exposed to climate change that often brings drought, flooding, and other extreme weather.

DM2009 finalist projects aim to protect the most vulnerable from these disasters, while also helping them to develop economically.  Overall, such initiatives are called "linking adaptation to development."

In Mozambique, droughts keep about 500,000 people in chronic food insecurity, and indications are that dry periods aggravated by climate change will stretch out beyond the current "hunger period" of October to January.

Helvetas Mozambique, one of the finalists, describes what happens:

"Without access to quality seeds, subsistence farmers practicing rain-fed agriculture continue recycling grain that has been exhausted after generations of cultivation, producing poor yields. Subsequent storage losses cause 22 percent of rural households to run out of stocks and suffer from food shortages during the..'hunger period.'"

To break this cycle, Swiss-based Helvetas proposes what it calls a "zero-emission fridge" consisting of low-cost storage facilities run by community-owned seed banks that "distribute quality seeds of improved crop varieties and serve as a social safety net to benefit 10,000+ rural households -- focusing particularly on the most resource-poor and vulnerable groups" (photo at left).

The 100 finalist proposals for DM2009 were selected from 1,755 international applications through a rigorous two-stage assessment process guided by the principles of fairness, transparency, and consensus. Nearly 200 experts from the World Bank Group and a range of other organizations volunteered their time to serve as assessors, each reviewing 20 to 35 proposals.

Each proposal was evaluated by a minimum of three assessors from a diverse range of backgrounds. Assessors individually read an assigned batch of proposals and then, grouped in teams of three to five, narrowed down the number of proposals through discussion and  consensus. At least one person in each assessment team participated from outside the World Bank Group to ensure a varied perspective.

Proposals were evaluated against the criteria of innovation, results, project design and organizational capacity, sustainability, and growth potential. Special emphasis was placed on innovation, as DM's foremost interest is to find new, creative and innovative approaches to weather-threatened settlements and agriculture, especially in developing countries.

The top 10 finalist countries were: Peru, Philippines, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Kenya, Ecuador, India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Colombia.

There are two ways to respond to climate change – adaptation and mitigation.  The responses are not an either/or.  Both are necessary.  Adaptation, as early as the short term, can cushion people and places against the impacts of extreme weather, including drought, heat waves, flooding, and rising sea levels.  Mitigation, over time, can slow down manmade global warming, which has been identified by many scientific studies as a major cause of extreme weather.