 My name is Violet Shibuze. I am a grassroot woman leader, a farmer, and from the western region of Kenya. I am also a founder of Shibuya Community Health Workers, which is a grassroot women-led community-based organization that works in the western region of Kenya and our work has been mainly focused on food security. Shibuya Community Health Workers is a member of Wairu Commission, which is a global movement of grassroot women-led organizations worldwide. I'm going to talk about how the community resilience fund has enabled our work on food security. Grassroot women had learned of a period of time on how they can be able to cope with the long spells of drought, with heavy rainfall, and still be able to produce food and ways that they can be able to do like irrigative agriculture or to dry food and different strategies that they would be able to cope with. So we first began with consolidating our own knowledge and information and developing tools to be able to understand how we could train each other and mentor each other because we are a peer learning organization to be able to address the issues of climate change. One of the biggest problems that we experienced was funding. The grassroot women began to test a process we had learned from India where we would save our own money, put money together in Akiti and then we would think of what activity we want to do at one time. And when we began doing this, we had an opportunity to conduct mapping to ascertain the impact of climate change at the community. This was a big milestone because the findings from the mapping we were able to share in community feedback meetings with our local leaders like the chiefs, the agricultural department, our gender office, people who work on environmental conservation from government and other NGOs. And in these meetings, it actually really changed the way we were perceived as just mere farmers as grassroot women in community to showing how we very much articulate the issues that affect us and we are able to consolidate all these issues to support the community to understand the magnitude and come up with solutions. The community resilience fund, as it says, is a fund which can be accessed more easily by the grassroot women. This fund is also a fund that the grassroot women can quickly get money if, for example, there is an issue of like erosion, which I said, or the crops are going, are rotting and they have to quickly construct silos where they can store the food or they can be able to engage in a quick training. So for us, resilience is being able to ensure that all the funding that you require, the activities that you need to do, there is a lot of preparedness that in case we have a situation you need to address, you can actually really quickly get funds and mobilize the community to be able to start addressing before there is much more damage. The moment grassroot women have our own money, in our own kitty for community resilience fund, and we can mobilize the government and sit together and look at the plan that we want to implement, develop or develop this plan with the government and the grassroot women produces some money or are able to give some money to support this. It really shifts the power dynamic between grassroot women and government and we are able to discuss from, to negotiate from the same level as partners and not as beneficiaries of just government resources. And when it comes to management, this money or this funding, first of all, the grassroot women will agree where they want these funds to be kept and also select a management which the management of this money are the leaders, these grassroot leaders select the grassroot women that they pick, they have a criteria of selection of the track record of these leaders and including the activeness in being able to deliver an understanding of the resilience activities at the community level and also how we function and also the groups that we come from because we do not just select leaders who don't belong to collective groups of grassroot women. Community resilience fund focuses on what is the priority of the grassroot women at that particular time. The other thing is that there is the uniqueness about this money is that there is joint planning, planning between government, grassroot women, other NGOs, the local leaders like chiefs. So it creates ownership in the way the plants are being developed, it also creates ownership in implementation. The other thing that is unique is how grassroot women have been able to use this fund to put the tools, to harmonize these tools, practices to become tools and even have been able to publish these tools. We have a tool that we call accessibility to learn for small scale farmers through land leasing which does not just talk to the grassroot women, it also talks to the policy makers on how to streamline land leasing and make it policy in the county. With the community resilience fund, we have been actually able to demonstrate how it is possible for grassroot women to identify a policy priority and be able to invite governments and discuss the policy priority and be able to influence what kind of policy they want at the county level that will work for them. Now because of this community resilience fund, we have been able to secure a day on 22nd February which the governor has now endorsed and it's going to be passed in the county assembly that on this day 22nd February every year, the farmers will be sitting with the governor to set priorities to also influence the budget before the budget process is over. So the grassroot women are going to have a formal participation in the budget process which wasn't there. This is a very big plus because we could not organize and many partners do not know how organizing actually contributes to the strength of grassroot women to be able to engage in resilience activities. My recommendation to strengthening locally led adaptation and strengthening financing at the local level, for me I actually believe that this is the strategy that will really be able to bring sustainability in addressing not just resilience but all development challenges that we have had. So it is very important for grassroot women to be reorganized as managers, as planners and people that can actually design and implement activities and be brought to all levels of decision making for them to be able to share how we can build locally led adaptation methods. How do we strengthen this kind of funding so that the grassroot women have more funding for them to be able to scale this kind of work for them to be able to reach more communities and train more women and even engage in more partnership.