CANSA Newsletter - October 2018

Welcome back to your CANSA Newsletter.

Hello and welcome to your October newsletter. We had a bit of setback during the month of September and couldn't publish our newsletter as we hoped, however, we are back this October with more new stories for you.

Thank you to all those who submitted their stories for this month's edition. We look forward to more of these in the coming months.

If you were not able to submit your story for October, no fuss - there's always the month of November! We hope this newsletter is helpful to you to keep track of what's happening within the Secretariat as well as the Network.

~CANSA Secretariat

PS - Please do send us feedback on else we can improve. Our form is below.

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WOTR: Gender Mainstreaming Must Exceed Education & Skill Development

Women’s empowerment is a mainstay of development actions. Traditionally this has been addressed by building women’s social capital and facilitating their empowerment by organising them into solidarity groups (SHGs). Interventions also extend to building women’s capacity to address their and their children’s concerns through health services and providing personal care advisories, literacy, numeracy and personality development training. While traditional women’s empowerment activities have focused on women’s rights and responsibilities, they have not been able to level the playing field in terms of economic parity between the sexes.

With this in mind, Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR) has been rethinking its traditional women’s empowerment activities with a focus on providing financial and business development support, to start and successfully manage micro-enterprises and create avenues of access to micro-insurance. The organisation's objective is to ensure that every woman has a ‘choice’ of what to engage in based on preference and capability, and not just dictated by gender stereotypes or skewed economic dimensions of society.

WOTR's recent issue of ECOLOGIC, has five stories of women’s empowerment - from taking the initiative to solve social issues in the village to revolutionising rice cultivation and collective efforts of men and women to shift to organic farming.

LEDARS: Seed Distribution for Resilient Agriculture

LEDARS distributed saline, drought and waterlogging tolerant paddy and saline resistant vegetable seeds among 756 farmers. LEDARS has been working with farmers and vulnerable women to increase the adaptive capacity to climate change under its project “Strengthening Livelihood Security of Climate Change Vulnerable People”.

On 23 June 2018, LEDARS distributed vegetable seeds and organic fertilizer among 404 farmers and 25 June 2018 distributed 3.5-tonne paddy seeds among 351 farmers. A total of 756 farmers received paddy and vegetable seeds. Seeds are distributed in the four Union of Shyamnagar Upazila where 256 farmers were from Burigoalini, Munshigonj, Kashimari union of Shyamnagar Upazila and 95 farmers from Uttar Debkashi union of Koira Upaziala.

BEDS: Disaster Preparedness Capacity Building Programme

Bangladesh is prone to cyclones due to its social and geographical conditions. Sundarbans and other coastal villages of Bangladesh suffered from the serious disaster due to cyclones including Sidr in 2007 and Aila in 2009.

Bangladesh Environment and Development Society (BEDS), Give2Asia and IIRR have been working together to implement the Disaster Preparedness Capacity of the Sundarbans vulnerable coastal community in Munshigonj Union, Satkhira District, Bangladesh since May 2018 to reduce the vulnerability situation of the fishing villages.

The most recent training conducted by the organisation, 'Building Disaster Preparedness capacity of coastal villages of Sundarbans Bangladesh' was held on August 14, 2018, at the Cyclone Shelter on how to assess the Village Disaster Risk. This training aimed to enhance and equip the most vulnerable sectors to prepare themselves on the onslaught of calamities such as cyclone which is common in Sundarbans.

NCC,B: Media Coverage on Climate Change on a Downward Trend

Network on Climate Change, Bangladesh (NCC,B) Trust has released the "Annual Media Track Report 2017" during an event with journalists at the Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU) in the capital Dhaka.

The report analysed the frequency and the quality of climate change related news published in three Bangla dailies – The Daily Prothom Alo, Daily Janakantha’ and Daily Kaler Kantho – and two English dailies – The Daily Star and The Independent. The “Annual Media Track Report 2017” prepared by the NCC,B Trust showed that The Independent has given the highest coverage to climate issues amongst the Bangladeshi dailies in 2017 in comprise other four.

The NCC,B report also highlighted the decreasing trend of international media coverage on global warming and climate change throughout the last decade (2008-2018). Through the analysis NCC,B observed that media coverage on climate change has not yet been reached to the desired level in Bangladesh. To overcome this situation, NCC,B recommended common initiative among the government, newspaper editors, journalists forums and CSOs.

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