Govt-CSOs collaboration to be strengthened

…As KASA revives Climate Change Working Group

Key government institutions and civil society groups have agreed on the need to strengthen their collaboration in order to maximize expertise and resources for curtailing debilitating impacts of climate change.

The Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the one hand and Care International on the other hand believe that Ghana can turn the challenges of climate change into opportunities through stronger emphasis on collaboration.

For Care International and other civil society groups, there could be even better prospects if civil society were more organised and the knitting of their activities scaled up. It is in this light that Kasa Ghana, a mechanism of Care International, has revived a Climate Change and Environment Working Group (CCEWG), which it constituted in 2009 but was seemingly in a lull.

At an information sharing and feedback session organised recently by Kasa on the outcomes of the 18^th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), representatives of 39 civil society organizations (CSOs) and six state institutions endorsed the revival of CCEWG.

Zariatu Alhassan, who works on the CCEWG at Kasa, says the goal of the group is to contribute to “reducing the vulnerability of poor people to the impacts of climate change through CSOs’ coordination, advocacy and capacity building for environmentally and economically sustainable and socially just response to climate change.”

It is expected that the working group will also become a major channel for CSOs to reach government with an aggregated voice.

The endorsement of the CCEWG meant that Kasa achieved its targeted outcomes for the organisation of the COP18 debriefing meeting. Ahead of the meeting, Kasa had indicated that says the meeting would specifically seek to: provide feedback on the outcomes of the COP 18 to CSOs; discuss key lessons for improving participation, feedback and follow up actions on the COP processes; and discuss the way forward for the CCEWG as a platform for coordinated engagement on climate change.

Meanwhile, government-CSOs engagement is to be enhanced through the National Climate Change Policy Framework (NCCPF) which is currently in the custody of cabinet for approval. According to MESTI, the policy document has strategies for advancing cooperation between government and civil society actors regarding rolling out interventions for addressing climate change effects.

Officials say the NCCPF is organised into two parts with three objectives. The first part of the Framework gives an overview of Climate Change and what it means for Ghana while the second part focuses on strategic issues. The objective areas are low carbon growth, effective adaptation to Climate Change, and social development. The achievement of the objectives will depend on seven systemic pillars: governance and coordination, capacity building, research and knowledge management, finance, international cooperation, communication, and monitoring and reporting.