Ahmedabad: Gujarat-based Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) is one of the recipients of the 2019 United Nations Global Climate Action Awards for its project “Women’s Action Towards Climate Resilience for Urban Poor in South Asia”.
MHT has been selected for the award in the category “Women for Results”, which recognizes the critical leadership and participation of women in addressing climate change.
“The recipients of the UN Global Climate Action Award are leaders from communities, governments, businesses and organisations, and they are from all corners of the globe and all levels of society,” said Niclas Svenningsen, Manager of the UN Climate Change Global Climate Action Programme.
MHT’s project is aimed at building resilience capacities of over 25,000 low-income families living in slums and informal settlements across seven cities in three South Asian countries, including Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Ranchi, Jaipur, and Bhubaneswar in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Kathmandu in Nepal.
“Under the project, MHT helped organize 114 Community Action Groups, which reached out to 27,227 women in 107 slums. Out of the women we have worked with, 8,165 women were recorded to demonstrate an increase in knowledge seeking behavior,” MHT said in a release.
Additionally, over 1,500 women have been trained as climate-saathis, who are responsible for communicating the issue of climate change with their community in the local language. This exercise resulted in the proportion of participants who viewed climate change as an act of god reduced from 26% to 9%.
Under the project, around 28,000 energy audits, which have saved over $ 7,00,000 per annum or more than Rs. 5 crores in electricity costs, have been undertaken in slum communities to date.
“These interventions included installing over 200 modular roofs and 500 roofs with solar-reflective white paint, while having also led to a reduction of 105 tonnes of CO2e per annum,” MHT said.
MHT has championed a women-led empowerment model that builds upon the conviction that if the urban poor are provided with the requisite knowledge to undertake vulnerability and risk assessments and are equipped with available resilient‐technologies, they will be able to devise and implement locally relevant and pro‐poor, climate-resilient solutions. To make this possible, MHT assists with facilitating the required infrastructure, institutional and financial mechanisms.
Through projects like these, MHT is empowering women to take action against four major climate risks, viz. heatwaves, flooding & inundation, water scarcity, and water-vector-borne diseases.
These types of slow-onset events tend to attract less global attention, while also disproportionately impacting low-income households.
