NAIROBI, Kenya, UN Women Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa in collaboration with IGAD, FAO, IFAD, AfDB, UNISDR among others will host a Regional Sharefair on Gender and Resilience on 9th and 10th November 2016 at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The theme for the Sharefair is on Strengthening Resilience by Empowering Women.
The Sharefair organizers have also announced ‘The Young Innovators in Agriculture Award’ which aims at recognizing cutting edge innovations in agriculture. The award aims at showcasing innovations that best provide solutions on how women and their communities can build and strengthen resilience through technologies and associated innovative strategies, projects, interventions and methods that can be expanded across Africa.
Innovators under the age of 35 years are encouraged to share innovations at various stages including projects at a pilot, medium or advanced level that strengthen women’s and girls’ capacities to mitigate, adapt, recover and learn from shocks and stresses while achieving the longer term-goal to reduce vulnerability and increase well-being of women and communities.
All submissions will be judged by an independent and credible external panel of experts with strong resilience programming experience. The winning innovator will receive USD 5,000, and USD 2,000 and USD 1,000 for the second and 3rd place respectively. An online catalogue of all innovations received will be created and available online to the public. In addition, the winners will be assisted to patent, scale up and commercialize their innovations.
Participants at the two-day conference will explore the role of women in building and strengthening resilience. The conference will also promote dialogue help and share experiences on gender-responsive resilience-related programmes and policies in Africa. It will also help accelerate development and humanitarian response towards the overall achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals on the continent.
According to UN Women’s Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa, Ms. Izeduwa Derex-Briggs, “Women play an important and active role in all aspects of disaster risk reduction, however, these roles are rarely recognized or included in structured formal systems. Public policy formulation and roll out should ensure that women and girls are not left out. By including women at all levels of society in resilience planning, we will deliver communities that will be able to quickly recover from manmade and natural emergencies.”