Real Change, Programme by Programme.
From the classroom to the borehole, from waste lands to safe housing — nine focused programmes, one standard of care for the communities hit hardest by climate change.
Nine Programmes. One Standard of Care.
Each programme is presented block by block — read the summary here, then follow straight through to the full programme page.
Child Education
All children in this scheme go to school. None of them goes to school barefoot or without books. This contributes immensely to increasing both their attendance and concentration level in class.
Climate change and its effects — drought and flood — take toll on education by affecting the stability of communities and breaking the course of school and academic sessions. Flood and drought affect children and their ability to get an education by forcing families to move to safer and greener areas where schools are sometimes inexistent or simply unaffordable for parents who have lost or left everything behind.
About 80% of small farmers in the world practice subsistence agriculture. The quantity and quality of their harvests fluctuate depending on the quantity of rainfall and temperature. Increased temperature and decreased rainfall lower crop yield, which in turn decreases individual families' incomes. With less disposable income, families are more likely to spend their money on necessities like food rather than on schooling fees.
Families are also more likely to pull children out of school so that kids can work and contribute to the diminished family income. Experience has shown that families that place the education of their children at the top of their priorities succeed in sending them to school despite the precarious conditions climate change has put them in — unfortunately those children's school attendance and concentration levels are so low that they find it extremely difficult to assimilate the lessons taught in class.
Most of them go to school empty stomach, barefooted, without books; some have to go from house to house selling vegetables or grains or cover tens of miles to fetch water and fire wood before going to school. Once in class they are absent minded and will be yawning throughout the day.
The CCRF's scheme takes into account the precariousness of the conditions of these children and their families and offers them the education that will guarantee them a better future.
Rural Youth Capacity Building
Rural youth development is extremely important. Training them in key areas like cooperative and project management, fund management, agriculture and market access will build their resilience.
There exists a chilling imbalance between the resources and populations on the planet. The world population is increasing while resources are decreasing. Scientists have sounded the alarm by saying that people are putting nature in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with the risk of extinction looming over 1 million species of plants and animals. Cultivable lands are shrinking, rivers are drying up, poverty has become epidemic in some regions of the world due to climate change.
The World Bank adds that without appropriate adaptation measures climate change will cause 100 million additional people to live in extreme poverty by 2030. Statistics and reports about the state of the planet sound more disturbing for the youths whose future seems to have been mortgaged by climate change.
Youth unemployment and poverty have greater implications on the wider society as they can generate insecurity, unrest and conflicts. Terrorism, in some parts of the world, rides on the back of young people's poverty, for they are easily recruited to join the ranks of gun wielders. Climate change-related shocks will slow down our progress in reducing poverty.
It is therefore extremely important to develop youth-centered approaches and invest in areas that are capable of having quick ripple effects around communities. Cooperatives show considerable potential for empowering youth and alleviating the growing global jobs crisis. CCRF's actions focus on training, organizing and empowering the youths in agriculture — crop and farming lines — and services to create jobs, eradicate poverty, and build the resilience of communities to climate change.
Women Empowerment
Women bear the brunt of the climate crisis and extreme weather. Building their capacity by designing special programmes for equipping them with adequate knowledge on funds management will build their resilience.
The plights of women and girls are highly underestimated and underreported; their huge contributions to the life of their communities are equally grossly undervalued. In 2008, ILO researchers draw the attention of the world to the fact that about 40 per cent of the global workforces in the agricultural sector are women.
Many rural women are sole or co-bread winners of their families; a considerable proportion of them shoulder alone all domestic activities, such as nutrition, child care and even education. And their workload, like firewood collection and water fetching, is highly affected by climate change. Women are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because they are poor; they are poor because they lack the two most critical factors of production, such as land and capital.
Apart from being the cause of poverty in some of the worst affected areas, the climate change impacts represent equally a great impediment to the sustained eradication of poverty. It is clear that women need more than sympathy. They need well designed empowerment programs geared towards generating for them sources of income.
CCRF allocates a sizable amount of its annual budget to help women to not only raise their head above the water but also build their resilience against climate change and become employers at the community levels.
Reclaiming Waste Lands
Re-generating wastelands by organizing communities to address degradation through sustainable land management programmes leads to food security and poverty alleviation.
Vast expanses of lands have lost their vegetal cover and their fertility has drastically dropped, leading to poor yields and meager harvests irrespective of the size of the area cultivated. This is the result of land degradation caused mainly by climate change and its attendant impacts — desertification, wastelands, deforestation, aggravated by overgrazing, excess use of fertilizers and pesticides, soil erosion, etc. — the direct consequences of which are drought, famine, migration, and conflicts.
Greenfacts has it that worldwide, approximately half of the people living below the poverty line live in dry lands, and their societies are particularly vulnerable as a result of dry land ecosystem conditions and poverty. Addressing desertification would therefore contribute to the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.
CCRF mobilizes the community of land owners and land users for the dissemination of knowledge on land management in the context of climate change resilience and adaptation. Under the guidance of scientists they are taught to adopt integrated soil, nutrient, and water conservation approaches that combine technologies based on biological, chemical, and physical principles.
This could significantly reduce the negative externalities of intensive crop and livestock systems and improve the productivity of lower-yielding but environmentally friendly production systems in more marginal farming areas. The first priority is to prevent the degradation of currently productive land; the second is to rehabilitate moderately and severely degraded lands — measures that facilitate the recovery of soil biological communities essential to efficient nutrient conservation and soil physical integrity.
Low-cost Housing Scheme
We believe that the provision of low cost housing far from coastal flood-prone areas reduces significantly the vulnerability of the population to wild disaster. Poorer people are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Most post-disaster counts of victims show that slum dwellers are worst affected due to the precariousness of their shelter. The slightest shock from extreme weather exposes the poor sectors of the populace to total material destruction, health hazard and untold suffering because of their lack of decent shelter to cover themselves. Coastal regions are threatened by rising water levels and experience more disasters.
Their conditions will worsen in the near future if programs are not specifically designed to move people living in clearly identified and marked flood-prone or unsafe coastal areas to risk-free areas. CCRF puts in place programs in collaboration with the communities at risk, governments — local, state and national — including local and international actors, to identify and develop areas proven to be safer for populations exposed to imminent and future shocks that could lead to damning impacts.
The role of the communities is to identify in common accord the safe zones so as to avoid land dispute and to ensure ownership and sustainability; the role of the government is to approve and put on the identified zones an official seal to give its institutional backing. CCRF and partners assist in raising structures that help to move those at risk to the identified safer areas.
Poverty Alleviation Programs
Building the knowledge and solidarity of vulnerable populations around community-based adaptation programs helps them to shake off the shackles of poverty.
The threats and challenges that climate change poses on the planet and humanity are huge. It has pushed 100 millions of people into poverty; to bounce back and start living decent lives, rural vulnerable communities have to be organized, because solidarity at community levels is the only surest measure that can form both strong resilience against and a good adaptation plan to climate change.
For the vulnerable poor and food insecure populations to raise their head above the water they need community assets around which they can rally, join hand and form a common front. Fighting climate change induced poverty is the critical mission of CCRF.
We want to accelerate inclusiveness and sustainable economic growth at community levels by training and guiding members in setting up structures identified as capable of building their resilience, their capability of promptly bouncing back to the original pre-climatic shock state, as well as bouncing forward to weather any other emerging post-climatic shock situations and challenges.
The ultimate goal is to put at the disposal of communities common assets that will keep them food secure, protect their children's education and their health system in times of extreme weather.
Youth Awareness
The Youth Awareness programme runs campaigns that make young people aware of their potential and of the challenges facing their communities — in both urban and rural areas.
Awareness of local opportunities and how to access them is built through community education sessions that put young people in direct contact with the resources, programmes and partners working in their own area.
Youth unemployment and poverty have greater implications on the wider society: they can generate insecurity, unrest and conflicts. An informed young person is a young person who can turn local opportunity into livelihood — and who is harder to recruit into the ranks of the dispossessed.
Through awareness campaigns, CCRF equips young people to know their potential, understand the climate challenges facing their communities, and take part in the solutions.
Potable Water Programs
The Potable Water for Life programme provides clean, safe drinking water to communities where the supply is unreliable. Through our partnerships, CCR Foundation is drilling boreholes, installing and repairing water pipes, reservoirs and water treatment plants.
Access to clean water is one of the most urgent needs of climate-stressed communities, and one of the fastest ways to change a community's health, education and economic outlook. Without it, families — above all women and children — spend hours each day fetching water, and water-borne disease follows.
Outbreaks of water-borne diseases, including typhoid, paratyphoid fever and malaria, are always experienced in areas hit by flood disaster — a cycle CCRF works to break at the source, by putting reliable water infrastructure in place.
Through partnerships with local governments, international actors and the communities themselves, the programme restores and builds the water systems a community needs to live with dignity.
Provision of Health Services
We strongly believe that partnering with health institutions during and after extreme weather events will contribute significantly in reducing the health impacts of climate change on the most exposed populations.
The health sector is one of the main victims of climate change. Climate and climate-related hazards such as floods, storms, and droughts have served as trigger events for more than 75% of the disasters that have occurred globally over the past decade. Proportionately, these disasters affect the least developed countries most intensely, proving to be especially harmful to poverty stricken populations.
Outbreaks of water-borne diseases including typhoid, paratyphoid fever and malaria are always experienced in areas hit by flood disaster. Though people in developing countries are most vulnerable to health risks globally, climate change poses significant threats to health even in wealthy nations. Certain populations, such as children, pregnant women, older adults, and people with low incomes, face increased risks, says EPA.
CCRF's management works with the personnel of health institutions to bring succor to people affected by floods and heat waves.
Where We Are Heading
Donating To The Cause, You Echo Their Voice
The voice of the worst-hit and hard-to-reach communities trapped in climate change induced poverty is echoed. Your support builds resilience, dignity and hope where it is needed most.