The Twenty-third session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 23) to the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is taking place in this in Bonn, Germany and it will be fundamental in advancing progress towards the change in climate and associate effects.

To help make progress in the countries in the Sahel, a region that covers nearly half of the African continent and is home to 300 million people, on November 9th, the Small Grants Programme, implemented by the United Nations Development Programme and funded by the Global Environment Facility, hosted a side event on “Youth and Women Investing in Land and Value Addition on Natural Resources to Mitigate Climate Change”.

It is estimated that over 30 million people in the Sahel do not have access to adequately nutritious food and are, per definition, food insecure. The impacts of climate change and variable weather patterns, with increasingly severe and frequent droughts, will exacerbate the situation for rural communities, especially women and youth. The event, organized in partnership with SOS SAHEL, focused on land investments as an effective way to implement and upscale sustainable food production, with a focus to the role of youth and women.

At the event, SGP announced its partnership with SOS SAHEL, discussed their complementary activities on the ground, and presented SGP’s most recent publication, “Community Approaches to Sustainable Land Management and Agroecology Practices”.

This partnership is intended to promote and scale up community-based solutions to climate change adaptation in agriculture and the management of natural resources in drylands through agro-ecological approaches. The partnership will also focus on social inclusion, by working with vulnerable communities, in particular, women and youth and will promote public-private partnerships at the community level.

SOS SAHEL was founded in Senegal in 1976 after a period of extreme drought in the Sahel. The NGO is active in 11 countries in the Sahel region and its mission is to improve food security and access to nutrition in rural and vulnerable communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.