The coastal communities in The Gambia should come
up with their own wise development strategies to tackle climate change, the
climate change programme coordinator of Child Fund has said.
Awa Minteh said the approach Child Fund has taken on climate change is to empower the coastal communities to come with their own development strategies to adopt and mitigate its negative impacts.
This approach is part of a five-month project dubbed “Enhance community capacity on climate change” funded by the European Union to the tune of D2.5 million and implemented by Child Fund The Gambia.
Speaking at Tanji village on Sunday as part of the ongoing climate change sensitisation programmme, under the project, Ms Minteh said they are to train a group of young men and women in each of the five selected coastal communities who would be leading the climate change awareness initiative in their respective communities.
The trainings are designed to focus on climate change, contemporary climate change adoption techniques and advisory skills for community mobilisers and opinion leaders and the establishment of community mechanism for monitoring climate change trends.
“In our intervention, we prioritised the coastal areas because the way the coastal areas are being depleted is far excessive than the inner land,” the climate change programme coordinator of Child Fund said.“So the idea is to have an ongoing climate change conversion and be able to adopt with the continued change in climate.”
The five-month project also includes an alternative livelihood scheme targeting various communities to reduce or stop cutting down trees.The communities will benefit from training packages to upgrade and develop their entrepreneurial concept and skills.
The beneficiary communities of such trainings would be urged to develop business plans that might have a possible funding under the credit scheme of the project which will be managed by the communities in a revolving fund scheme.
The main beneficiary communities to this EU-funded Child Fund implemented five-month project, apart from Tanji, are Gunjur, Brufut, Sanyang and Tujereng villages.
