Workshop Participants

31 participants were present in the workshop, representing Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal. There was participation from 18 civil society organizations namely Voice of South Bangladesh, Care Bangladesh, Actionaid Bangladesh, BARCIK, SDS, YPSA, CPRD, Pariwartak, Youth Climate Network, Janathakshan, Ecohimal Nepal, Oxfam Nepal, KIRDARC, Prakriti Resource Centre, Clean Energy Nepal, NYCA, Save the Children- Asia Pacific, Save the Children Nepal, UNICEF ROSA and CANSA including three very vibrant youth network representation.

Objective for the workshop

1. To build capacity of CANSA partners to incorporate, strengthen and amplify the voice of children at regional and sub-regional forums.

2. CSO partners discuss the prevailing gendered issues faced by girls, boys, and non-binary children during capacity building activities in order to address the gender gaps and promote rights amongst children.

3. To identify partners and process for documentation and sharing of good practices employed by CSOs to ensure inclusive, gender sensitive and transformative policies, practices, systems, budgets and services for children’s rights.

Key highlights

The workshop focussed on developing common understanding of CSOs and youth groups on the impact of climate change in South Asia and then building on how our existing programmes on climate change are integrating gender and child rights. 

The workshop balanced between information sharing and group participation through various exercises to get participants inputs and identify what were the challenges in integrating gender and child rights in child change work and to mitigate those challenges what were the existing best practices.

After this session youth groups were given the floor to showcase their work on climate change and their suggestions and action plan to take this work forward. Also suggestions were sought on how they feel they can work collaboratively with CSOs and bring visibility to women and youth voices from local areas to national, regional and global forums. Save the Children shared the monitoring and accountability mechanism also with partners to develop reasonable action plans building in monitoring mechanisms and quality benchmarks from the beginning of the work and making it integral part of the follow up interventions.

All the inputs received were finally used by participants to further develop action plans for possible interventions in the next three years on advocacy policy, capacity building requirements and enhancing women and youth participation.

Follow up action

The broad action plans thus developed will now be discussed with national teams in smaller groups through virtual/ physical meetings, as feasible, to develop national plans with ownership by the associating member.