As a co-founder of Women’s Climate Centers International (WCCI), EFCWest continues to provide capacity building training for our East African team.
Women’s Climate Centers International co-creates sustainable solutions with vulnerable communities emphasizing low-cost environmentally appropriate technologies, advocacy and leadership. WCCI is unique in several respects. WCCI stands out in applying cross-sector, holistic climate solutions that truly reach the most at-risk people. While many organizations work with “grassroots” women, they are more often reaching women who have had educational and economic advantages that the most rural and at-risk women do not. Instead, WCCI’s core mission is to serve and sew “the seeds of the grassroots.”
Single, stand-alone approaches do not work against complex problems that have complicated root causes across many different areas–political, social, economic, technological and environmental. They are all intertwined and therefore need to be addressed systemically rather than in solos. WCCI is tackling the problems of gender inequities, environmental degradation, and climate change in the ways research shows are needed – by applying many different solutions that collectively work together to create true, lasting change while building resilience.
WCCI is also unique in its bottom-up approach. We start with community dialogues to uncover the needs and desires of local people. Many global organizations are just developing terminology around this concept and their training is top-down rather than bottom-up.
