 Asalaamu alaikum, good afternoon everyone. Apologies for my voice, I caught a call with this wonderful air conditioning in this hotel. As Hannah mentioned, I am the National Coordinator for the GEF Small Grants Program based in the Maldives. Although I am delivering this presentation on behalf of my colleagues in New York, who couldn't be here, Charles Neodynga is the focal point for CBA in the GEF Small Grants Program. My presentation outline is over there, I will not go through it. Just to basically present to you what is the GEF Small Grants Program. It has been in existence for more than 20 years now and present in 127 countries. The major objective is restoration and conservation of environment, at the same time as promoting livelihoods for vulnerable communities. The GEF Small Grants Program has a special window on CBA, community based adaptation, where the projects are targeted specifically towards managing the risks of climate change and its variability. In terms of grant amount, the maximum that communities or grantees, which are CSOs only, only NGOs and CBOs or informal groups, non-governmental groups, it's about 50,000 US dollars. Specifically on CBA, in 2008, with the GEF funding through its strategic priority on adaptation, a five-year pilot program was undertaken in 10 countries. In 2009, with the Australian aid funding, similar project was implemented in the Mekong Asia Pacific region. Finally, in 2011, this Osaid funding was extended for the SIDS, the small island developing states of the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Pacific. As you can see, a lot of funds have been invested in CBA activities over a number of years, 19.2 million with 101 projects in total. The numbers don't add up because some of those are cross-cutting and we double count them. So that's the CBA projects we have. What we are trying to show is often we hear that SGP projects are too small, too scattered, too localized, too influenced national or regional or even international policy or strategies. And we would like to show you that by its design, we start with the national level, at least in terms of co-operated from the very beginning. So the SGP, the way it works is for a CBA program that is participating in the country. We start with the country program strategy. And this is a document that is aligned with the national NAPA, the UNFCCC commitments, and we start with the CBA program strategy. And this is a document that is aligned with the national NAPA, the UNFCCC commitments, UNDP and UNDAF, and all other climate change planning processes. So already we set the scene from the national policy and strategies in place. The second way is that in order to implement this project, we have to start by capacity building the capacity of the NGOs and CBOs that would directly carry out these projects. The whole process from the beginning to the end, so from the beginning of the program until the project is produced in results, it is overseen by a national steering committee. And the national steering committee itself is composed, consists of the all the stakeholders, representatives of all the stakeholder groups that would include the government, the private sector, civil society organizations, and the UN system in the country, and also academia and researchers. So again, we try to ensure that there is this element of participation and participatory approach and to avoid that these are just standalone small projects to start with. So the results from these projects are then fed back into the national planning processes, either by the NSE member, that's the government member sitting in the steering committee, or through the UN, UNDP in most cases. Another way in which we try to ensure that experiences from the CBA projects reach the national level and eventually the international level is through good communication. At each level, we have a variety of communication tools that we use. At the local level, where the grantees are often farmers or fish or folk or women's groups, they hold their regular meetings with regard to the project, or when they get together for their social activities on the islands or in the communities, wherever the projects might be happening, they would share their experiences, and more formally through capacity building and planning workshops. At the national level, GFSGP is training all the national coordinators, so each country has its own national coordinator, and the grantees to prepare photo stories. We find that this is an excellent way for the grantees to communicate their projects' results. They can do this in their own language, and they just have to have a simple camera, and it's just a simple tool for them to tell stories instead of writing big reports and so on. At the global level, like you see the publication on the slide, the GF secretariat would produce reports, case studies, policy briefs to inform policymaking. I just wanted to illustrate the points that I made previously through two case studies of CBA projects. Unfortunately, they are not in the Maldives because we are just starting with the CBA projects in the Maldives. This one needs a case study from Vanuatu, building community and ecosystem resilience to climate change through diversification of water supply options. The picture here you see an elderly person having to paddle two kilometers to mainland when there is a shortage of rainfall on his island. I have given here a snapshot of the partners and the grants, sorry, excuse me. I just want to show you the grant level here. So basically, Lelepa Island is a very small limestone island and with the erratic rainfall due to climate variability, the experimental shortage of water. So at a very local level, the slide shows the project results where communities trained, the awareness is built on climate information, climate change impacts overall and all that is related with the climate change causes, impacts and adaptation. And the water storage capacity is also increased. I will not go through the numbers and basically their capacity to manage their water resources and the communities empowered to face the climate change and undertake adaptation. In terms of policy impacts and national strategy impacts, this project resulted in the formation of Lelepa Water Use Committee and the development of a local water use management policy that didn't exist on this island before. So that's a great achievement at the local level. Similarly, taking it to the next level above, at the national level, this project was taken on by the government and replicated in a neighboring island. And in addition, the SGP partners are now invited to sit on the government planning processes for water management as well as climate change. So that's one example. The other example we have also on water resource management, but this time in the Caribbean, Jamaica, with multiple partners and a small amount of funding, 50,000 that comes from GFSGP and then in kind and cash from other sources. This community as well focused on rehabilitating their water catchment tank, increasing the capacity of the community, including the NGO members that undertook this project and basically building their resilience to water scarcity in the face of climate change. Once again, moving on to the national level upscaling, the government of Jamaica has been very receptive towards the results of this project. And in fact, this project is contributing to the already existing adaptation policy on increasing rainwater harvesting as a mechanism to cope with water shortages due to climate impacts. Once again, the SGP partners are very welcome on the government planning processes. In fact, they sit on the advisory boards now. And this project will be actually upscaled through the United Nations Development Assistance Framework. The UN country team has adopted this project to be scaled up to the national level. So I hope these two case studies have illustrated that they are just not local, but they do have bigger impacts beyond the small funding and the small scale that we start with. Of course, we face many challenges to scaling up and I have followed a number of sessions in the last two days and today as well. And we are all aware of the challenges to scaling up small CBA projects. And one of them is that policymaking can take many, many years whereas these small projects have a short lifespan. Similarly, that makes it difficult to follow up after the project is closed, how it is continuously feeding into the policy process or at the same time translating policy into action. And we have also heard that some of the VRM methodologies that are used are a bit cumbersome and difficult for some of these, well, NGOs and CBOs with limited capacity. And again, CBA activities are site-specific and context-based, but it doesn't mean that it does not transform lives of small communities or individuals and then it has the potential to be scaled up. And just to conclude, SGP is trying to gather evidence-based local experiences and practices from CBA projects that can inform national policies in a variety of ways. A lot of the projects are learning by doing for the communities, for the NGOs and CBOs as well, sorry. What we feel is we are empowering the most vulnerable groups to build their resilience because these are the groups that face climate change impacts most because their livelihoods are dependent on very fragile ecosystems and climate-sensitive resources. And just to conclude that seeing so many of the CBA practitioners here and researchers and donors and it is my first CBA conference and I am very pleased to be here. And SGP would also like to take this opportunity to partner with as many organizations and experts and practitioners to take the CBA experiences forward. Thank you very much.