By.Damba Rogers
The assistant commissioner climate change department in the ministry of water and environment, Bob Natifu commends the efforts by local environment civil society of tracking climate change financing and adaptation funding saying, the finding will definitely be used to feed into the climate change communication strategy.
On September 18, the Government of Uganda launched its new strategy to spread information on climate change adaptation across the country.
The four-year Uganda National Climate Change Communications Strategy and Standard National Climate Change Indicators, which was developed with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), helps integrate climate change adaptation into government planning and budgeting frameworks.
According to Bob, the assessment by Environment management for livelihood improvement (EMLI) with support from Care International should dig deep to see that every projects funded under climate change resonates to what largely is called climate change financing.
Even beyond that, we have as a country committed to say in our NDCs where we have set targets on 70% and for Uganda to implement the targets, we require 70% of the sources to come from the international space and the 30% from local space namely CSOs and government of Uganda.
Bob says, “the outcome of the ongoing process by EMLI is helping address the 70% divided pointed out earlier in 2015 so that we can ably report every year or after five years how much financing has come into the country.”
He also reminds EMLI that being a consultant, they need to see what the rest of ugandans and government do not see adding that this should be well executed to meaningfully contribute to national programming in regards to climate change.
Whatever recommendations that will come out of this process will form a very strong basis into all the policy documents that government is trying to prepare both whether its national communications or even policy documents and national papers that government is trying to build about to have concrete recommendations to main streaming climate change issues if transformation is to be realized.
The deputy executive director EMLI, Robert Bakika and the assistant program officer EMLI Christine Mabatusa state that, according to preliminary results from the findings, a number of project documents are not reflecting what is actually on the ground, with some projects taking over a year without starting even when the signing was done by the funders and implementing partners.
Meanwhile, the issue of projects not well addressing the gender issue has been mentioned several times by the consultants and this has paused question marks on whether the implementers and project proposal writers really understood or understand gender.
Robert Babkika further stresses that they have faced a challenge of some donor partners not opening up to information needed to better assess the projects. This is dragging and time consuming yet the project report has to be filed in time to Care international.
The six months project is assessing climate change adaptation financing funded projects between a period 2013-2016 in Westnile, Northern, Western, Karamoja, Eastern and Central parts of Uganda and 21 projects are to be assessed.
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