5 minute read
The Marketplace magazine July-August 2021
By Dennis Tessier
Recently, MEDA has seen a heightened interest from supporters eager to know more about what the organization is doing to ensure environmental sustainability within our work. It is exciting to receive such emails and letters.
These give our environment and climate change (ECC) technical team the opportunity to talk about the innovative ways MEDA is working to address climate change and protect biodiversity.
MEDA has put a much greater emphasis on the integration of ECC initiatives across the organization over the past few years. MEDA has intentionally changed its approach from “doing no harm” to striving to achieve positive environmental outcomes in all its work. This ranges from reducing our carbon footprint through greening our offices and eliminating unnecessary travel to supporting our clients to transition to environmentally sustainable business models.
This evolution is both internally motivated, as many staff have a strong commitment to sustainability in their life and work, and externally motivated, as donors and the global community respond to environmental degradation and the threat of climate change.
In 2020 MEDA launched its new strategic plan, Towards an Equal World, which embraces environmental sustainability and climate action as a guiding principle to achieving impact at scale. The strategic plan clearly spells out that MEDA needs to provide business and technical expertise around “environmental sustainability to help firms and entrepreneurs adapt to the changing climate and engage in sustainable production.”
Doing so is crucial to achieving sustainable economic growth, growth that supports our clients to anticipate, absorb and recover from economic, climate and social shocks, particularly for marginalized populations such as women and youth engaged in agriculture.
With such a strong focus on environmental sustainability within the strategic plan, the elevation of ECC to a technical area in 2020 was timely as it joins MEDA’s other technical areas: investment, financial services, market systems, and gender equality and social inclusion.
Through a collaborative approach MEDA can apply technical expertise in a way that incorporates social, environmental, and economic dynamics into project design to ensure overall sustainability for the clients we work with.
MEDA has a diverse environment and climate change technical team, which I am honored to lead. We have more than a dozen environment and climate change technical experts within our organization. Some are headquarters based, others are based within the countries where we work across SubSaharan Africa, Central America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
In May ECC specialists came together during our first annual ECC conference to share experience and expertise, train on new tools and approaches, trouble shoot common challenges, coordinate work plans and ensure our activities align with MEDA’s strategic plan.
MEDA is guided by an environmental sustainability policy and a green growth and climate action framework. Its environmental management system aligns with the framework, providing specific technical guidance for project staff across the organization. This includes six specific focal points around mitigation, adaptation, gender, health, green finance, and partnerships. Each strategy has a set of tools to support the implementation within our projects.
Our technical team also contributes to several coalitions that pursue climate action and research. These include the Centre for Sustainable Climate Solution, or CSCS (founded by Goshen College, Eastern Mennonite University and Mennonite Central Committee), the Canadian Coalition on Climate Change and Development, and the University of Waterloo’s Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change.
How all of this translates into positive environmental outcomes can be seen from the impact at project level. Technolinks+ in Nicaragua provides one such example. The project’s agribusiness and environment coordinator, Jorge Luis Gonzales, describes Nicaragua as a resilient country.
Nicaragua has endured COVID 19, political turmoil, an economic slowdown and two major hurricanes in the past two years. When pressed on what he means by resilient, Gonzalez is quick to look at the achievement of the Technolinks+ project. This effort aims to provide 8,000 e-vouchers (a partial discount provided by the project, with the remainder of the cost paid by the client) towards environmental technologies for farmers. It also provides matching grants and business support to 85 agri-businesses and access to information through knowledge fairs for 35,000 farmers — half of those being women.
“What makes Nicaraguans resilient is the fact that despite all the obstacles farmers are facing they are investing in and adopting new practices and technology,’ he said. “They are investing in the future.”
Another example can be found in Tanzania with the Small-Scale Business Value Chains (SSBVC) project. Beatrice Sawe, the project’s environmental coordinator, has worked diligently to support partner companies, or lead firms, to develop and adopt environmental policies and strategies for their workplaces and to meet national regulatory compliance.
All the lead firms the SSBVC project has partnered with have adopted environmental policies and strategies and include adopting workplace occupational health and safety protocols. Lead firms have also initiated the difficult process of achieving National Environmental Management Council Certification. Many have succeeded.
Sawe, through the SSBVC project, has also been a champion of environment innovation grants (EIGs), matching grants to lead firms to adopt clean technology and move to environmentally sustainable practices. Several lead firms have adopted solar for productive use, such as irrigation, water heating, cold storage, and power for machinery. Grants have been provided for rainwater harvesting, biogas, hydroponics, solar dehydration, and greenhouses as well. EIG’s are proving to be an effective tool in many projects.
MEDA’s Ukraine Horticultural Business Development Project also employs EIGs to support 10 of the lead firms it works with in the agricultural sector. The impact of the EIGs overall is substantial: a reduction in energy use of between 62.5 and 96 per cent, a 35 percent de- crease in water use, a 25 to 300 per- cent increase in productivity, a 125 percent increase in yields, and a 75 percent decrease in pesticide use. MEDA’s projects in Nicaragua, Tanzania and Ukraine provide a snapshot of what is happening across MEDA. There are many more examples that demonstrate how MEDA is striving to promote positive environmental outcomes. What is most important is that MEDA, through its strategic plan, its strong technical expertise, project design and programming, has all the building blocks to set it on the right course for a green and inclusive future.
