Indian NGO to receive UN climate action award for empowering women to fight climate change

An Indian NGO by the name Mahila Housing Sewa Trust will be given a UN award in December for organising a project and empowering women in low-income households to increase their resilience to impacts of climate change. Mahila Housing Sewa Trust will be one of the 15 recipients of the 2019 United Nations Global Climate Awards, that recognises and honours some of the most practical examples of what people across the globe are doing to fight climate change. The award will be given at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25), hosted by the Chilean government in Madrid in Spain, on December 10. 

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Initiatives carried out by the NGO

The Mahila Housing Sewa Trust's initiatives have benefitted 25,000 low-income families across seven cities in India, and neighbouring countries of Bangladesh and Nepal. The project has an integrated model as its centre, wherein women take collective action and technology incubation to formulate solutions that are locally relevant, pro-poor, gender-sensitive, and climate-resilient. For example, women were trained to be energy auditors under the project, who encourage households to switch to more energy-efficient products, thus forming a women-led network of green energy and building products.

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Other solutions include using sprinkler taps to reduce the flow of water, harvesting rainwater, and other behavioural changes leading to an increase in water quantity in more than 60 per cent of households and more than 32 per cent having sufficient water during summers. Through such projects, the Mahila Housing Sewa Trust empowers women to take action against four major climate risks: heatwaves, flooding and inundation, water scarcity, and water-vector-borne diseases, says the UN Climate Change. It says the Mahila Housing Sewa Trust has aided to organize 114 community action groups, which have reached out to 27,227 women in 107 slums.

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Of the women they've worked with, 8,165 women were recorded to demonstrate an increase in "knowledge-seeking behaviour". The NGO has trained over 1,500 women to become "climate-saathis", who are responsible for communicating the issue of climate change with their community in their local language. Through this exercise, the proportion of participants who viewed climate change as an "act of god" reduced from 26 to nine per cent.

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(With Agency Inputs)