 Okay, Kazi, whenever you're ready. Hello, everyone. I'm Kazi Zawathsen. I'm the Climate Resilience and Agriculture Manager of IDE. And I will be welcoming you in this session while everyone who will be interested to participate in the session joins us. Community-based adaptation 16. It's the second day of this conference. And this is the 13-number session. And we are joining from different time zones and like the session just started. So our different participants from the other groups we are hope to joining. So please bear with us. This year's CBA 16 conferences call is local solution inspiring global action. That means we will be sharing different stories, different experiences. And we would like to see how these actions are getting to global level. So today's session, I will be speaking to you shortly about like the topic and who have been organizing this session particularly. But we have a, I'd like to remind you all that we have a great list of speakers in different breakout groups. But we also have great keynote speaker and also a great end-up speaker who are practitioners themselves. We will be hearing stories from Bangladesh to Nepal to Kenya and not only that, different examples of global practices to make sure that these innovations that have been happening from different parts inspire our participants. And we know about the best practices, but not only that, we engage with these speakers to ensure that these like there is a cross collaboration and cross learning among different practitioners. So in different breakout rooms, I would request participants to be as much as interactive as much as proactive possible. Please ask questions to the speakers. And like if you have strong opinion and like you would have find like different ways to do certain things, please feel free to like interact with the speakers. We would encourage more and more engagement with the speakers and not only that on an overall discussions with whoever speaking on the like in a breakout rooms. Just it's a community-based event. So we would appreciate if everyone joins and bring their point of view, their experiences to ensure that we are learning from each other. We are taking the best practices from local level to the global level because as you know, the COP 27 is coming and this year's COP 27 will be like talking more a lot about how do the COP 26 locally led adaptations promises are going to be implemented. So this is a good setting point we think to talk about like, you know, how do we engage as a community towards different stakeholders to make sure that like, you know, these different practices and different lessons are amplified and are like, you know, taken up by practitioners from across our community. So on that note, I believe now that it's almost time to like, you know, get started with our session, I'd like to let you know that today's session is about how should local governments, how should local governments change to put LLA into practice? And this session is hosted by Friendship and NGO from Bangladesh. Along with that, we have IID, a think tank and IDE, a global NGO. So without further ado, I would like to request the session role calling to start if everything is ready. And I would first would like to request Kaji Amdhad Bhai from Friendship to like do the introduction today's speech from us. Thank you, Kaji Zavaitasen. Thank you so much for your introduction for today's session. Today we shared the Friendship. You know, Friendship is a Bangladesh-based organization working last 20 years and mostly our working area climate impacted. And Friendship last 20 years developed and identified, explored a series of adaptive solution established different mechanism system in different pathways and which we can take and forward, you know, across the country and beyond country. Today we'll share how we mobilized local government change to put locally-led representation into practice. I will share actually the process itself we have established and at the same time impact so far and recommendation from our end. In the very beginning, as an example, let me share the local government structure in country according to the constitution, we have different organograms set up for the country. One is the rural setup and the urban setup. From local government point of view, rural setup we call Jila Purishat which is district council, sub-district council and the bottom line Union Purishat which is local government. In the urban setting, we have city corporations and municipalities. And now let me tell you the structure of local government and that structure you see the urban setup and rural setup as I mentioned, beginning from central administration, we have four layers to reach local government. I mean, those who are very close to the community, all the, I mean, steps we have to follow to take forward a policy implication into action. And this is the way we manage a national disaster management system in Bangladesh. The top, the council is headed by prime minister and different layer and the instrumental and the key player is the minister of disaster management belief in one hand. In other hand, the minister of environment, climate change and forest. So we are practicing for interpretation of the policies into action and how we can mobilize different level of governments mechanism into action. And this first priority is the local government who are based close to the community and who are day to day weakness of the crisis. In the, and in Bangladesh, we called it Union Parishad and the Union Parishad has several standing and other committees and those committee, they involve some people who are not elected from civil society. And there is a chairman who led the Union Parishad, the local government body and there are nine word for each and every union. Each and every word, they elect one councillor and for nine word, there is a reserve seat for three women councillor and each women councillor, they look after for three word. So meaning each and every word has its own elected councillor, men, women, whoever and for all nine words, there are three councillor, women councillor. Well, then let's see, this is the setup, the way we may not involve in local government mechanism in Bangladesh. And now Bangladesh has a very two dynamic document, one is standing order on disaster and another is Bangladesh climate change strategy and action plan, which revised recently and yet to be published publicly. That's why I'm referring the old document cover. This standing order on disaster, very clearly define the role of national government, divisional, district, sub-district, up to the Union Parishad, which is bottom line local government. Each and every step, what to do and how to take action, they don't need a prior permission as the government define their role and responsibility to address disaster or any crisis. And the relevant committees, the involvement, resource, everything defined there. These are the policy documents, but we are trying our level best to unfold this policy document and to take this policy document into action to bring impact. And this is the platform. Local government service are inherently linked to improving the building of communities and climate change issue obviously is not really away from everything. These are part and part of everything for today's world. We truly believe the, you know, each and every development intervention, climate change consideration need to be properly taken care. And local government, they have their own knowledge about the local environment populations. So they are the two actors. So considering these things, we offer capacity building. We offer their learning session to learn more about the policy procedure protocol and what appropriate action need to be taken forward. And there's a friendship introduced this approach. We call Community Initiated Disaster Restroduction CIDR. And this approach address three action, what is preparedness, response, and rehabilitating, I mean the resilience, three actors, one actor community itself, other actor NGU and the last but not least the local government. We do believe these three actors need to be connected for each and every step to take forward or to response the three actions. The NGU or local government or community stand alone can't work for preparedness, can't act for response, can't work for resilience. From the very beginning of any planning, all three partners need to be heavily involved. And thus we organize this session at the community level. We organize participatory assessment jointly with the community men, women, and all section of people. And we make sure the local counselor are present there so that he can understand the voice of community. He can realize the context situation. At the same time he is witness, he or she is witness to take this assessment and proposed action forward. And you see the different community, they exchange their findings and ideas to revisit their plan for better action. We applied different tools. I have not explained here. Please let us know if you are interested to learn. These tools are very much applicable for literate, non-literate, whoever can contribute for each and every steps. At the same time each and every issue. Friendship believes integrated adaptation so that health, education, economic opportunity, infrastructure, rights, management, everything we consider into the assessment and planning. And that's why we organize the series of consultation meeting. We organize capacity building initiative and then to make sure the mobilization and engagement of community are in place. Friendship participatory approach very well-known in country and at the same time our approaches are replicating by some other organizations and appreciated by the government. We ensure women, young people, disabled people, children and others are taking part each and every step of our intervention. We don't, we always believe in bottom-up approach. We take care of local knowledge and blend with new knowledge. This is the spirit of our action. And this participatory approach when finished at the community level. And then because I explained the local counselor always attend in those community meeting and here this is the main council office and each and every community, they send some representative and they present their community issues, findings to the local council office. So that the review, they discuss, they have critical questions, answer. So at one point they decide out of all the recommended actions for that particular community which actions are will be taken care by the local government and which are some other induce and other stakeholders taking part in this consultation meeting so that this is a shared responsibility meeting. This is an example. For example, one actions, they recommended road repairing for 24.5 kilometer but local government incorporated into their plan 8.25 kilometer road. Some other lateral installation, they recommended 1567 lateral but local government approved 100 lateral. Number is not really important here. The important is the process, the way we are taking community actions into the local government mandate. So there are many things we always respect local government issues and finally they declare into their action plan local government what are the issues they are considering for budget provision and implementation. This is one example. And these are the steps we follow for implementation of a project. This road is needed to raise, to protect flood water and local government community, they jointly implemented this repairment and raising. This is another example. The community identified they don't have water option because of salinity. So they need a reserve pond. So local government had no and educate fund to make sure a reserve pond, the boundary, the construction work and many things. They requested friendship for joint efforts. And this is the spirit. Jointly friendship and local government built this arrangement for a reserve pond. And this is another embankment repair. We created a provision within the local government budget for this embankment repairing. And at the same time the local community, friendship from disaster management committee. We call friendship disaster management committee each and every community is FDMC. Friendship mobilize those volunteers, committee members jointly with local government. They protected, prevented the embankment erosion. Now let's come to way forward. This is critically important. Capacity development initiative need to be structured to reach local government and to enhance their capacity for bigger decision. We need to decentralize financial resources from the national or central government to allow local government to become less reliant on central government and utilize the fund on need basis. The flexibility is very much important. Today's world climate change very unpredictable. So we need to globally that voice need to be raised. The local organization, local government need to be empowered more. They must have some flexible funding provision so that they can address. I'm sure the MEL of course need to be aligned with that but we have no other choice. One prescription for all community can't manage crisis. Allocate ensure fund I mentioned already and establish effective system that should not be ad hoc mechanism. The effective system and methods to ensure budgetary allocation at local level needed. And that must for funding provision need to be included. And capacity building I already mentioned we initiated this approach to build the capacity on different interpretation of policies, different description of provisions and we double help them to connect with the international government too. This is all about my today's presentation. If you have any question please. Thanks, Karzy. There was one question in the chat which maybe I will just read out to you if I can find it for Vincent. Sure, our colleagues will response you and I'll join in responding soon. Great, so that was a comment from Vincent. So maybe you just wanna dive in the chat. What we're going to do now is split into breakout groups. And now we have four breakout groups lined up today and I will just cancel the spotlight on you and I'm gonna share my screen and explain who is in the breakout groups today. So the way this is going to work is we have four breakout groups and each one has its own presenter. The four breakout groups are themed broadly on, excuse me, this is my presentation. The four breakout groups are, sorry, let me see if I can find it, here we go. The four breakout groups are themed on aspects of local government. Now this list is not necessarily exhaustive but we think that perhaps you can look at the different principles and group them together in this way. So it's a little bit arbitrary but we think that it's enough for us to have an interesting discussion. So in the first breakout group that will be inclusive decision-making will be the focus and I will deliver a short presentation there. And the second group is on financing adaptation and for that we have Winston Atamba who is the climate change director from Behega County in Kenya. The third group will focus on male flexibility and learning and we have Emily Beauchamp who is the male lead and is part of the resilience team at IISD International Institute for Sustainable Development and we have a group on effective decision-making and we have Madan Paria who is a senior advisor at IDE. Now the way this is going to work is we want to give you the choice of which group you want to be in. So what we're gonna ask you to do is if you can go and click chat and find your name on the right hand side and just right click on your name and hit rename and let us know which group you would like to be in. I will then allocate you to breakout groups. Once you're in your group each presenter will share their presentation and then there is then some scope for discussion on this topic. We'll have about 25 minutes in each breakout group then we'll come back together and you'll have the opportunity to choose a second group for further discussion. So we won't all join every group today. So have a think now about what your top two are and we will allocate people accordingly. Madan, I'm aware your hand is up. Do you want to just jump in here? Oh, yeah, Sam, thank you very much. I just wanted to mention that the fourth group is effective planning actually. Thank you. Yes, that's my mistake. You're doing things too quickly. Thank you. So if everybody could just choose the breakout group that you would like and I am going to set those up now. Right, so. Hi, Sam. Hi, Sam Barashe, how are you doing? Yeah, I wanted to find out how do I choose the group that I want to go to? So I've actually just realized there's an easier way to do this which is I'm going to open all the breakout groups and you will get a message so that you can choose which group you want to join. So that's actually very simple. So I'm going to open all those rooms now and you should see that there are four rooms. Feel free to join the room that you want and just to remind you, the first one was on inclusive decision-making. The second one was on financing adaptation. The third was on male flexibility and learning and the fourth was on effective planning. And for those looking to join group one, I will be there in a second. So we have a number of people still not assigned. Are you struggling to join your groups? Yes, Sam. I'm not seeing anything. Madanji as well. Okay, let me assign Madan now. Kazi, which group were you? Four. Okay. M.E.L. flexibility and learning. Yeah. I need to take over from... Okay, we have a number of other people in the room who are still not assigned. So if you could just let me know which group you would like to join. I want group one. Anybody else? Otherwise I can assign you randomly. Welcome back everyone. Have you found that a useful discussion? Stefan, do we want to take a little bit of very short feedback from a couple of the groups before we go back and allow everybody to choose a new room? Yeah, sure. Shall I start with our group number two on climate... These? Yeah. Financa, I mean, inclusive... No, it was what? Sorry. Financing adaptation. So Winston presented a very, very interesting and innovative tool about climate financing through counties in Kenya, having different levels of committees so that they can... It's kind of climate adaptation fund that is allowed by the local regulation that is really pushing towards this kind of financing mechanism. And we've been challenging him a lot and asking a lot of questions to understand how it works and what are the challenges? How about the flexibility of the funding vis-à-vis, for example, the unpredictability of the climate events and the way how decision-making is ensured at all levels and there are different committees. So it's... Yeah, I would recommend people to join our group for the next round because it's very interesting and Winston confirmed that this is really a pioneering tool for local climate finance in the country. And yeah, I feel this is really interesting and innovating what they are doing there in Kenya. So yeah, it'll be very interesting to learn. And I think we can speak for hours about that because the mechanism is very well thought at all levels and it's participative, inclusive, and yeah, it has many, many positive impacts. Great. Next time. Karzy, maybe very quickly to me. No, no, no, Emily will speak from our group. I'm asking, oh, why not the second record group, Stefan, continue with the same session. He is very enthusiastic. Emily, please. Yes, okay, thank you. And our group, I mostly, I did just a very quick, we were a small but very dynamic group. And after presenting just a few lessons, mostly from experience of different countries and the NAP Global Network in applying and developing their devolved M&E mail system with local governments. So I share some of the institutional challenges that usually our partner countries face and also what we've heard that, to date over like the past eight years of experience, what has been working well. So during our group in order to hear about that, but what we've also discussed was that there's a need for making sure that community and local governments have clear objectives and clear objectives and priorities in what's evidence and what mail systems they need to have. Otherwise, it ends up being a puzzle and they end up being torn apart by the different requirements from national governments, from different donors and they end up with a variety of tools being applied just sporadically once or just a few times for a year or two. And then after that, it disappears. So there's really a need for local governments and national governments to support them in articulating what their needs are, what is already being done and this becoming the basis to say, well to donors and to other actors, this is what we're doing, strengthen the existing systems, but don't impose a new one on this. Thanks, Emily. I'm gonna hold feedback from the other two groups until we all come back. And of course, we'll make the jamboards available and I'm aware you have to leave. So I'm gonna get us back into breakout groups really quickly so that you can present. So everybody, this is your chance to choose a new breakout group. Now you should be able to choose your own group if you are looking on a laptop, you can hit the more button at the bottom. You should be able to hit breakout groups or they might even be a symbol and you should be able to choose the group that you want. If you are struggling, you can also change your name in the chats by hitting rename and putting a number in your name and I can make sure you're in that group. And if that's not working, turn off mute and just tell me where you want to be and I'll move you there. And for those who are moving into inclusive decision making, just bear with me for a couple of minutes. So I fixed the breakout groups and then I'll be with you in just a moment. So feel free to choose your group. Yeah. Do we, who are presenting also move? So presenters will stay in the same place. Okay. We should be back in the plenary at around, yeah, in 15 minutes. 15 minutes, yeah. Thank you. So I'm hoping people are able to choose their groups. Ms. Anu or I can see you're not in a group. Would you like me to put you in anyone particularly? Gingbedanti, do you want me to assign you to a group or Jillful? No, okay. I'm going to join my group now. See you in 15 minutes. Sam, you're on mute. I'm on mute. That's not very helpful, is it? Thanks. I'm just closing the breakout groups and then we're running a bit over time. So maybe we'll ask people to share a few reflections in the chats and hand over to you. So let's just wait for the break up. Sam, you should end up the breakout groups. Yeah, they're closing in five seconds. I was thinking Stefan, maybe we can just take reflections in the chat rather than doing report back and we can hunch right over. Great. Would you like to introduce Runa? Yeah, the formality is correct. So you give me three, four minutes, maximum? I don't need so much, but okay. So welcome back everyone to this plenary. I hope it's a very interesting question. If you have any comments to make, we're running a bit out of time. So please add your questions or comments in the chat box and we'll bring this question and messages forward. Runa will be closing this very interesting session with a word by Runa Khan. She's the founder and executive director of Friendship Bangladesh. And yeah, she will give us a talk about what Friendship is doing and what she thinks about the local engagement with the local governments and as an example with what Friendship is doing. So thank you, over to you. And thank you very much. So I would really like to thank all my colleagues here from IID, IEDE and my Friendship team. So I think it's been a very strong session and I hope we will also, it will help to shed some light on smoothening because so often I have people asking, how do you work with the government? How does it work? Does it work? How do you expand? How is it that you are not having a parallel system of government along with the government? So these are questions I think all of us are faced with. And today's session has been quite illuminating because I think we have come in from different perspectives to talk about it. And so there are ways basically, this smoothing, this effective collaboration with the local government, communities, NGO is part of what we are all doing to implement the locally led adaptation actions. And why is the subject also coming up in a sense because issues have arisen. And issues have arisen because of this silo kind of work that we tend to do. But actually that by now, I think we have realized that that really cannot work and especially it cannot work with the government. Government are the responsible and they are and should be and made responsible as get-takers. And the actual vision, be it of the government, whichever political party comes, wherever they come should be the same as that of which each one of our organization are striving towards. The implementation processes may differ. We may have different ideas. Of course, the private sector and the civil society are a lot more agile in their work and they can afford to be, whereas the government is like a large corporate and it's like the mechanism takes time. But responsibility of the government to work with the communities starts from the local level and then it goes to the national level because at the national level, the often see decisions being made which perhaps at the local level cannot be so well implemented. People are clever. The government officials are clever. The communities are clever and I think the NGOs are clever. So everybody has a solution. It's the question of harmonizing the solution and accepting the fact that after all in the end, when we don't exist, we are not there. It is the government's responsibility. And local governments have a huge connection with the communities. It is sometimes due to lack of funding or due to lack of understanding, due to lack of an innovative solutions that they cannot reach the last mile. They know it, but they cannot reach the last mile. And hence, we come in in a very important role. I don't like the word supplementing. You know, there is this thing of supplementing, complimenting government. I do not like the word supplementing. We are not supplementing anything. We need to work with the mindset of complimenting the government even in areas such as ours, where, and in many others, where you don't even see the government simply because it's just maybe they don't have enough budget or it's just too difficult in management. Even then, we have to deeply understand that it is their responsibility and we are only complimenting them. And I think the implementation of the work needs to also be done with a lot of variety because, you know, over the last 20 years, we have seen there are a lot of very good people. And if you are working with variety, people want to be part of the success journey. And this success journey needs to be, it needs to be opened out and not held onto. We mustn't think it is only our work because our works are always being kind of complimented by other works which are from the side and we need to accept that with humility. And one thing which must be, I think, extremely important in the way we work because that would bring negative impact is our interventions cannot provoke wrong actions with the government. We must not do anything which will, which will give rise to any form of corruption, any form of illegal activities and may lead to maladaptation because then there is no end to the spread of this which can happen around the area and whatever good work that we all try to do cannot be impacted. So that needs to be rule one when we are stepping into this zone. Friendship has, I think, with the Kaziumdada, they have given a lot of solutions that we are doing and which we can scale up and engaging the local government is also a way to empower them because sometimes they're not aware of the problem which is at stake. They don't know how to tackle it because of lack of opportunities, finance, understanding and sometimes, of course, ego plays a stake there. We cannot say it doesn't. Of course it does. And I'm very pleased with the breakout groups today because I think we've had a lot of very good input from the great breakout group. So there are some notes like, for example, so thanks Sam from IED, IISD, IED and the Kenya Vihiga County which has taken the lead on this. And with inclusive decision making due to structural inequality, we need to address that. We delicate in designing the participation so that people are not alienated. I think this came through quite strongly, the financing adaptation, climate financing, innovative systems and how to deal with the unpredictability of disasters. The monitoring evaluation learning flexibility is to start small and iterate. Then you kind of blow it, absolutely. And the decision making, how power dynamics plays a role. And so I had this friend who was doing this video on power and he said that the only time I would really, I would agree to doing this film is on this book or photograph session, whatever he was doing, is if I can have George Bush and who was the president at that time. So he was with Air Force One for seven days flying around with George Bush, interviewed him. And then he interviewed the power which is held by customs officers at the field level in the airports. So power does play and we need to be aware of that and we need to play around it. It's all kind of dynamics which we need to play. So the monitoring evaluation and learning the local government and companies approach it in different ways. And we can learn a lot from the way that they are approaching also. I think we need to keep that. And of course, keeping SDG in line. And of course, as IDE rightly, very rightly said that we should carry this to COP. So an open invitation to COP because friendship will be having some events there also at the COP 27. And we have engaged local governments and the communities there. And of course, our mangrove forestation projects will be there. And as many of you know that we have been ranked out of 150 projects as 20 best practice for forest landscape restoration in South Asia Pacific. So we will be highlighting these work. And I hope that I see you all at the COP and thank you for this very, very interesting session and for organizing this. I think there has been a lot of learning and sharing. So thank you. Great, thanks so much for those comments and lots to chew on. We've overrun by 10 minutes. So without further ado, I want to thank everybody for coming to the session. Friendship and IDE for co-developing the session. It has been absolutely fascinating. And I'm looking forward to putting together the messages and catching up in due course. So yeah, looking forward and please do hope to see you in the plenary in just under an hour and a half where we'll hopefully be able to hear from all the other sessions as well. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.