Winners of the 2022 and 2023 Local Adaptation Champions (LAC) Awards presented their triumphs and challenges at the Fourth Gobeshona Global Conference, including funding, political support and goodwill, opportunities to scale, and further accolades.
As part of GCA’s Global Hub on LLA, the LAC Awards reward and spotlight innovative, inspiring, and scalable locally-led efforts to build climate resilience among the most vulnerable communities. The 2023 winners include:
The Pastoral Women's Council (PWC), winners in the Women in Leadership category, for empowering Indigenous pastoralist women in northern Tanzania.
Espacio de Encuentro de las Culturas Originarias, A.C., winners in the Capacity Building category, for engaging communities in the development and implementation of ecotechnologies such as dry toilets, energy-saving stoves, fog catchers, and vegetable patch irrigation systems in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Aumsat Technologies LLP, winners in the Business Adaptation Solutions category, for a technology that uses satellite-based radar analytics to pinpoint underground water sources and optimal locations for groundwater recharge sites in India.
The Local Government Initiative on Climate Change (LoGIC), winners in the Innovation in Devolving Finance category, for innovation in supporting local communities to help get finance for local adaptation actions.
The event began with welcoming remarks by Anju Sharma, GCA’s Global Lead on LLA. Sharma highlighted the Awards’ significance in recognizing local action and harnessing valuable insights to drive future adaptation endeavors. Following this, 2023 Award winners discussed the impacts of winning, including a boost in funding, visibility, political support and goodwill, opportunities to scale, and further accolades.
Stellar James Millya, PWC, said they only realized the impact of winning the Award on their work after congratulatory messages and messages of support started to pour in following the media coverage of the Award Ceremony in Dubai, including from government agencies. She outlined plans to use the Award money to expand interventions empowering women pastoralists. “Our plan for the Award fund is to scale up the rainwater harvest intervention that we have to other locations, and recruit more women to benefit on that intervention. Also, we will allocate the same fund to scale up our grass seed bank intervention.”
Tzinnia Carranza López, President of Espacio de Encuentro de las Cultural Originarias, A.C., highlighted the organization’s efforts to enable vulnerable communities and women through innovative climate-resilient technologies. Elia Silvia Perez-Gonzalez, a community beneficiary, emphasized the impact of these initiatives, saying (in Spanish): “The best benefit that we have received from the foundation are the dry toilets, energy saving stoves, vegetable gardens, and a biofilter. All of this is what the organization has given me, and all of this has helped me a lot in health and financial situations.”
Riddhish Soni, CEO of Aumsat Technologies LLP, emphasized GCA’s role in boosting visibility and partnerships for his organization through the Awards, saying the videos and promotional material produced by GCA had helped them explain their work to potential customers in layman’s terms. “Following our recognition by the GCA, we've experienced a significant uptick in large-scale work orders from governmental bodies, national banks, and NGOs. Notably, prominent organizations that were previously challenging to engage with have now begun collaborating with us, including the SELCO Foundation, Acumen, IndusInd Bank, ICICI Foundation, ISRAEL Embassy, and Smart City Gandhinagar Limited.”
"Our achievements have also been recognized more widely at a national and international level – we have since received the National Startup Awards from the Government of India, which represents the highest accolade bestowed upon startups by the government. We have been selected as the winners of the Imagine H2O 2024 cohort, the largest water technology competition organized by the Singaporean Government.”
A K M Azad Rahman, Project Coordinator for LoGIC, discussed the Award’s impact on forging new partnerships with international financial institutions, governments, and United Nations agencies. He emphasized the significance of the Award for LoGIC and Bangladesh, saying: “This Award was very important for the Local Government Division as well as development partners to show that Bangladesh is not only vulnerable, but has the leadership role in showing the path of adaptation.”
Recipients of the 2022 Awards also participated, to share their journey and insights. Sushil Dhakal, Community Development and Advocacy Forum Nepal, highlighted the additional opportunities presented upon receiving the Award, stating: “We were able to participate in COP28. We had the local government present our work as a side event in the Nepal pavilion. We were there to present our work and locally led achievements at that event.”
Kennedy Ododa, Agricultural Lead of the ADA Consortium, Kenya, also expressed how the Award had has helped the Consortium to create a long-term strategy for scaling, stating: “The funds helped us to have a clear vision in terms of developing a strategy. We now have a 2024/2028 vision clearly mapping objectives and where we want to go in the next four years.”
See more information on the 2023 LAC Awards here.