Senior Staff from AZEECON member countries receive capacity development training

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Phnom Penh, Cambodia (June 23, 2014) – Senior staff members who perform communitydevelopment work and facilitate training activities from AZEECON member countries received a week long TOT training on “Facilitating Food Security and Livelihood Programs in the Context of Climate Change”, held from 16 to 23 June in Phnom Penh.

Participants take a review session to reflect their capacity before, during and after the training.

The training course, which was organized by LWD in partnership with International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) under the AZEECON EETV program, aimed to enhance the knowledge and understanding of the participants on the basic concepts on climate change, climate change responses and the use of participatory tools to design community adaptation programs for food security and livelihoods. In his opening remarks, Dr. Sam Inn, LWD Executive Director, drew the attentions of the participants to the world’s changing climate, the causes and the negative impact of climate change.

Dr. Sam Inn

“Climate change is caused by human being and human society. The more human society develops, the more they cause climate change to the world. As the results, the poorest countries and the poorest people are seriously affected by the climate change. This is unfair to the poorest countries that did not do much to cause climate change, but are more seriously affected,” Dr. Inn said. “We as a least develop country, we need to enhance resilience by providing capacity building to the community so that they can cope with and adapt to climate change, and help them mitigate the risk of climate change,” he said. “We need to learn more about innovative approaches how to deal with climate change, share and reflect, and customize these knowledge and skills to our respective context.”

Participants conduct field practicum at Taing Bampong village, Ta Sal commune in Aoral district of Kampong Speu province.

The training course, the first in a series of three courses designed for AZEECON members, included a two-day field practicum to highland, lowland and the riverine areas in Kampong Speu and Kampong Chhnang provinces where participants can practice the tools they learned from the course. On the last day, participants were assigned to develop action plans by country, respectively, in order to identify their initiatives in applying the lessons they have learned. Mr. Sann Lwin, Emergency Response and DRR Officer for LWF Myanmar, said the training topic was very interesting and important to the participants because it was the topic of the world’s concerns.

Mr. Sann Lwin

“We will disseminate what we learned from the training and look to modify our existing programs, mainly for climate change adaptation towards food security and livelihood programs,” he said, adding that he would also share his learning with 59 agencies working on disaster risk reduction and food security in Myanmar. Another participant Mr. Mohammad Abdur Rahman, Project Design and Reporting Senior Coordinator for RDRS Bangladesh, also expressed a similar impression to training topic and modules. Mr. Rahman said that the course was very interesting, educative, informative and insightful. “We have learned so many things from the course. The most important part of this learning is how to involve the community in the whole process of developing the climate change related adaptation plan,” he said.

Mr. Mohammad Abdur Rahman

In his action plan, Mr. Rahman said he would share what his team learned with his organization’s senior management and senior staff. He also had a plan to develop the curriculums for two different courses, one for RDRS staff and the other for the community. There were 12 participants attending the TOT training course. They were from LWD Cambodia, LWF Myanmar, LWS India Trust, LWF Nepal, CDRM&CDS Indonesia and RDRS Bangladesh. Six months after each course, a 3-day capacity enhancement cum technical backstopping activity will be organized. This will be for sharing and learning from the experience of the participants. Additional two more topics will also be facilitated to further enhance the learning.