MECCA Africa

Volume1,No.7,January2012 MonitoringandEvaluationofClimateChangeAdaptation InitiativesinAfrica*

*MECCA Africa is the official newsletter of the project An Experimental Approach to Capacity and Toolkit Development for monitoring and Evaluation within Climate Change Adaptation Initiatives, which is supported by the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) programme, a joint initiative of Canadas International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Kingdoms Department for International Development (DFID).

Announcement
MECCAAfrica will undertake two important outreach and training activities, namely: Produce a documentary video based on the experience of IUCNs PAGEV Project in utilizing the MECCAAfrica M&E toolkit and training manual, and Organize O i a training i i workshop k h in i Rabat R b on the aforementioned M&E toolkit for over 30 M&E and climate change professionals. More information on these activities is available in the Upcoming Activities Section on Page 4.

Communities of Practice: Lessons learned from the SEA Change experience on Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Interventions
DennisBoursI,Leodegardo PrunaII,andSarya SokIII |Dbours@Pactworld.org
WhatareCommunitiesofPractice? Cognitive psychologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger1 define Communities of Practice (CoP) as groups of people who share a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better. better Communities of practice define themselves along three dimensions: what they are about, how they function, and what capabilities they produce. Each Community of Practice is unique, but they share the following common characteristics: Peer to peer collaborative networks; Driven by the willing participation of members; Focused on learning and building capacity; and Engaged in knowledge sharing, developing expertise, and solving problems2. What is SEA Change?

IN THIS ISSUE
CommunitiesofPractice:Lessons learnedfromtheSEAChange experienceonMonitoringand EvaluationofClimateChange Interventions..................................../1 Member Profile: SEA Change../2 EnergyandClimateChange AdaptationinAfrica../3 UpcomingMECCAAfrica Activities............../4

SEA Change is a newly formed Community of Practice (CoP) focused on improving the practice of monitoring and evaluation of climate change interventions in Southeast Asia. SEA Change is an answer to the growing needs found in the intersection of monitoring and evaluation and implementation of climate change interventions in Southeast Asia and beyond. For more information on SEA Change, refer to the Member Profile Section on Page 2. Lessons Learned The main recommendations and lessons learned from the startup of the SEA Change CoP were: (i) Capitalize l on shared h d vision and d goals, l (ii) ( ) Focus on key k areas of f shared h d interest, (iii) ( ) Continue to build b ld membership base, (iv) Foster internal interaction and move from the central role towards a facilitator role, (v) Leverage internal champions as leaders, (vi) Further research on external intellectual resources, (vii) Recognize diversity and need for contextualization, (viii) Learn from the successes (and failures) of others, and (ix) Start small. In its first year, the SEA Change CoP witnessed a significant growth in members, from 18 to 70, and also in the percentage of its members who were M&E practitioners, from 17% to 64%. A second Annual Members Meeting took place on November 910 2011 to discuss the way forward in the second year and to address issues around the role and value associated with SEA Change Changes s scope and legacy4. Lessons from the SEA Change experience were drawn through an Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) that was undertaken to understand the evolution of the COP. These lessons, which are discussed in subsequent sections, provide ample learning opportunities to similar COPs such as MECCAAfrica.

About the Network

Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change initiatives in Africa (MECCAAfrica) is a network of organizations, experts and stakeholders with interest and involvement i climate in li change h adaptation d i i issues i in Africa. Visitus:http://www.uneca.org/mecca/

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I. II. III. Mr. Dennis Bours is the current team leader of SEA Change The SEA Change Second Annual MembersMeetingreport: Dr. Leodegardo Pruna is a Professor at the Tarlac State University. He is among the earliest and most active members of SEA Change Ms. Sarya Sok was the team leader SEA Change during its nascent years. She is currently a consultant for a company based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

UNECA

The project An Experimental Approach to Capacity and Toolkit Development for monitoring and Evaluation within Climate Change Adaptation Initiatives is jointly implemented by UNECA, OSS, AGRHYMET, and IUCN.

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MemberProfile:SEAChange
Continuedfrompage1 Using ONA to Understand the CoPs Evolution
During the SEAChange kickoff meeting in October 2010 an initial ONA was completed, which was repeated during the second Annual Meeting to map the CoPs network expansion over time. The CoP network grew not only in members, but also in the number of connections between and among SEA Change members. Closer analysis of the network metrics reveals a heavy reliance for connectivity upon a number of network hubs and in one year the network was about twice as reliant upon these hubs as what would be necessary for longterm sustainability. While this suggests that there is still much work to be done, this pattern is a normal one for networks of SEA Changes maturity. In the paper Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving5 Krebs and Holley discuss four stages of network development: (1) Scattered Fragments; (2) Single HubandSpoke; (3) MultiHub SmallWorld; (4) Core/Periphery. The second ONA suggests that in its first 12 months of existence the SEA Change CoP has progressed from scattered fragments to a hub and spoke network. In conclusion, the first year has followed a normal progression pattern and marked a success for the evolution of the SEA Change CoP. New connections have been made both within the CoP itself as well as with external resource hubs. These connections in turn can be leveraged to further advance the goals of SEA Change over the coming years. Some recommendations for doing this are as follows: Sustainability of SEA Change: It is critical to begin to foster stronger interconnectivity between members through small world networks. These small world networks can either focus on geographic or thematic relations, or focus on relationship building across traditional divides so that people have access to innovation and important information. The main focus should be to facilitate collaborations for mutual benefit Partnerships: Besides the empowerment of individual members and their interconnectivity, it is important to form partnerships between SEA Change, other Communities of Practice and organizations with a similar vision and goals. At this point in time, SEA Change has signed partnerships with the ClimateEval CoP, the Adaptation Knowledge Platform (AKP) and the Asia Pacific Adaptation Network (APAN) and is seeking further collaboration with networks that will add value to its activities, Leadership From Within: SEA Change will continue to provide a strong platform for local leadership to connect across the region and internationally. Creating more opportunities for members to lead webinars, publish their work and represent SEA Change at conferences will support and encourage local leadership and entrepreneurship, Impact: It is important for SEA Change to evolve from a platform where members share information to a platform where they collaborate and take action on p g the p practice of monitoring g and evaluation of climate change g improving interventions. Concurrently, improved practice can positively influence climate change policy makers thereby leading to longterm impact brought about by the CoP.

With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and technical and logistical support from Pact, SEA Change is a newly formed Community of Practice (CoP) focused on improving the practice of monitoring and evaluation of climate change interventions in Southeast Asia. SEA Change seeks to assist both practitioners and funders in leveraging the power of networking to improve organizational performance and achieve crosscutting goals in regional responses to climate change. SEA Change aims to achieve this through: g p partnerships p and building g member Fostering capacity for strengthening M&E in climate change Sharing best practices, lessons learned, guidelines, approaches, methods, tools and innovations to improve M&E practices, particularly in relation to M&E of adaptive responses to climate change Influencing policy and practice around M&E of adaptive responses to climate change interventions SEA Change conducted its KickOff Event on October 29, 2010 with participants representing five Asian countries to analyze the relevance of this initiative to CoP members and to formulate the first mission statement for SEA Changea. The KickOff Meeting results and subsequent communication were used to develop the Community Charter, formulating the communitys rationale, goals, deliverables, membership guidelines and community organization, including the establishment of an advisory board. The final Community Charterb and advisory board composition were completed by March 2011. In April 2011, SEA Change commenced a full implementation of its activities, with its online platform going live on April 1, 2011 and its first webinar bi h t d on May hosted M 4, 4 2011. 2011 For more information on the SEA Change CoP, visit: http://www.seachangecop.org or send an email to the team leader Dbours@pactworld.org
a. The SEA Change kickoff report: can be accessed at:
http://www.seachangecop.org/seachange/files/docum ents/2010_11_30_COP_KickOff_Meeting_Report.pdf

Conclusion Most of the lessons learned from the SEA Change experience are not unique to monitoring and evaluation of climate change interventions, though a number of characteristics make the development of the SEA Change CoP both extremely necessary as well as challenging:

b.

The SEA Change Community Charter can be accessed at:

http://www.seachangecop.org/seachange/files/docum ents/Charter1.0.pdf

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Continued f from Page g 2
Monitoring and evaluation of climate change interventions is not a science set in stone. It is a highly dynamic field with concepts and frameworks developing rapidly in the fields of M&E and climate change individually as they do on the intersection of the two fields, The concept of climate change is often misunderstood and misused as a buzzword or fad, like the use over the past decades of empowerment, structural adjustment and Millennium Development Goals, which makes it more difficult to identify real climate change interventions and as such creates fluidity on the boundaries of the SEA Change CoP,

EnergyandClimateResilienceinAfrica
Yacob MulugettaI |YMulugetta@uneca.org
Context The energy challenge in Africa is at the heart of the continents development challenge. It is a worrying fact that today millions of people across Africa lack access to the most basic energy services, electricity and clean cooking facilities. The region has the lowest electrification rate of all the regions at less than 30% of households or as many as 545 million people without access to electricity. electricity This picture becomes even more complex when considering the future energy landscape where the annual rate of new connections in Africa is not keeping pace with new household formation due to population growth. Moreover, reliance on traditional biomass is prevalent in many African countries, amounting to about 80% of the primary energy demand in the continent. According to the WHO, the overreliance on traditional biomass to meet basic energy needs comes at a significant human cost in terms of the amount of time spent in collection and use of fuels, and the associated health impacts from the use of such low grade fuels. It is important to stress here h that h the h energy access problem bl places l a heavy h b d on women and burden d children who are the main providers and users of household energy.

Talking about climate change interventions we have not yet delved into the discussion on what we see as an intervention. The original 18 members focused mainly on climate li t change h adaptation, d t ti b t by but b February F b 1 2012 the 1, th membership base has grown to 130 members with more new members focusing on mitigation and climate change policy. The key areas of shared interest for SEA Change Of course, the energy access and energy security concerns are not solely confined to the household sector, but also extend to the productive sector. For example, the might very well be shifting accordingly, agricultural sector accounts for less than 2% of the total energy and 3% of Monitoring and evaluation is all about measuring whether electricity consumed in the continent despite employing 6080% of the working you reached preset goals within a certain framework. population and accounting for over quarter of GDP in most African countries. Thus, Measuring the actual output of a Community of Practice on access to modern energy services (including equipments and machineries) at all these fluid topics is extremely hard and preset goals stages of production in this and other productive sectors will be critical for change over time with changes in the concepts of M&E and enhancing income generation and meeting other key Millennium Development climate change, change in our member base and the Goals. In essence, addressing the energy access concerns relating to the productive interests and focus areas of new and current members. sector is an important step for making a systemic transition to a more efficient and This demands agility within SEA Change to respond to this modern energy pathway. fluidity. Clearly, the achievement of universal access to modern energy services is an As SEA Change matures over time as a Community of Practice, important goal for Africa. Indeed, the urgency of linking energy access to human members will refine its direction and take the lead on creating and economic development was underlined recently by the UN Secretary General g p products. While members continue to be the key y to during his launch of the Highlevel Group for the Sustainable Energy for All knowledge this growth, it will not occur with SEA Change members alone. Initiative. The initiative seeks to achieve the goal of Sustainable Energy for All by Linkages with other M&E and climate change networks and 2030 by meeting three interlinked global targets: universal access to modern communities are critical to building dynamic evaluation energy services; doubling energy efficiency; and doubling the share of renewable frameworks that are adapted for climate change interventions. energy in global energy supply. This will also locate energy at the core of two of the most pressing global challenges reducing poverty and minimizing the risks of climate change. Reference
1. Wenger, Etienne (2006) Communities of practice. A brief Accessed introduction http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ January 30, 2011; Wenger, Etienne and Richard McDermott, and William Snyder (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press Pioneers of Change (2005), Building Communities of Practice A summary guide, prepared for INK ABM/URP, Ethekwini Municipality: http://www.meadowlark.co/community_of_practice_ handbook.pdf The SEA Change Second Annual Members Meeting report: http://www.seachangecop.org/files/documents/2012_01_05_S EA_ Change_CoP_Annual_Meeting_ReportFinal.pdf Valdis Krebs and June Holley, Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving, 2006: www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf

ClimateChangeandEnergyrelatedinterventionsinAfrica Cli t change Climate h i a defining is d fi i issue i of f our time ti and d that th t business b i as usual l is i no longer a viable option for Africa as climaterelated impacts could impose yet further costs on future development targets. Hence, the mission to widen energy access and improve energy security and addressing climate change are now widely viewed as interrelated objectives. It is estimated that Africa needs to invest about $23 billion per annum over the coming two decades to widen energy access in order to meaningfully support the ambitious regionwide development plans and deliver on social development goals. It is also critical that the future energy system in Africa is climate resilient, whereby new energy infrastructures are designed with adverse, weatherrelated contingencies built into them; and existing infrastructures are upgraded to meet the climaterelated challenges of the future.

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Dr. Yacob Mulugetta is the Senior Energy and Climate Specialist at the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC), UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)

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Upcoming Activities
In the coming months, MECCA Africa will undertake two important outreach and training activities. MECCAAfrica is preparing for the production of a documentary video that will be based on the experience of the IUCN Project for Improving Water Governance in the Volta River Basin (PAGEV) in utilizing the MECCAAfrica M&E toolkit and training manual. The shooting for documentary video will take place in Tengodoko, Burkina Faso, where PAGEV is implementing its activities. The video will be a means for reaching the broader M&E and climate change community and for disseminating MECCAAfricas achievements and knowledge products. M CCA Africa is also preparing to MECCA host a training workshop in Rabat. This workshop will train over 30 M&E professionals and program managers, working on climate change initiatives in Africa, on the Projects M&E toolkit . More Information on these activities will be posted as they evolve on the Events section of the MECCAAfrica website: http://www.uneca.org/mecca/in dex.html Continued from Page 3
Furthermore, the high degree of climate uncertainty due to the range of predictions from different climate models requires designing and building infrastructure that would withstand different impacts and possibilities. This is likely to have cost implications but the do nothing option will leave critical infrastructures exposed to the vagaries of climaterelated impacts, which in the longrun is likely to impose higher economywide costs. A recent World Bank study warns that countries with underperforming energy systems may lose up to 12% of growth potential annually as a result of blackouts and the haphazard interventions needed to avoid total system collapse. While the energyclimate dilemma for Africa is a cause for concern, there are also reasons to be optimistic. Over the past decade, economic growth patterns across Africa have been both high and stable, with at least a dozen economies across the region having expanded by more than 6% a year for six or more years. The IMF forecasts growth patterns to remain high over the coming year. However, maintaining growth and economic diversification requires additional energy supplies and maintaining a reliable and efficient power sector for which substantial investment in Africas energy infrastructure will be required. In this regard, Africa has a considerable comparative advantage over other regions given the regions vast underutilized renewable energy resources such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and bioenergy. For example, the region has only been able to develop less than 9% of its exploitable renewable energy potential to date, and considerable opportunities also exist in promoting efficient production and consumption of energy. Moreover, countries in Africa do not yet have as much of a sunk cost in carbonintensive infrastructure as other regions, and therefore in a relatively better position to leapfrog towards a cleaner and sustainable energy pathway. This will bring longterm economic, health and social benefits as well as potential to enhance the reliability of energy source and system resilience, provided through a combination of centralized and distributed (decentralized) technologies and systems. The time for such a rethink could not be better for the region given the risks associated with pursuing conventional energy trajectory, and the opportunity to chart out a new energy path and capitalize on new technologies and finance. This will of course require greater readiness on the part of countries in creating the enabling institutional, regulatory and policy environment g investment in low carbon energy gy systems y that are reliable and costeffective in the that would encourage longterm. MonitoringandEvaluation In the context of climate change, the energy sector has unique significance due to its relevance to both the mitigation and adaptation agenda. To this end, while progress has been made towards monitoring and evaluating the mitigation dimension of climate change, for instance, takes the Measurement Reporting and Verification (MRV) of energy related mitigation actions, much less progress has been made in the measurement of adaptation. However, the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of adaptation, along with the measurement of the economic, economic social and environmental dimensions, dimensions is emerging to be of interest for countries and organizations addressing the climate change issue in Africa. To this end, work needs to be done towards mainstreaming energy related adaptation interventions and subsequently in developing and implementing comprehensive and relevant frameworks to monitor and evaluate the impact of these interventions. Moreover, given its importance to Africa, there is a need to explore adaptation and energy nexus in more detail, with a view to understanding what this means for development plans and strategies across the continent at local, national and regional levels.

Disclaimer
The content of this newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the project funding and implementing organizations. The designations employed and the presentation do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the project funding and implementing organizations concerning the legal status of any country, territory or city or its authority, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

TheMECCAAfricaNewsletterTeam
ForwardfeedbackontheNewsletterto:RobiRedda RRedda@uneca.org,orPacomeKossy Pkossy@uneca.org Editor :GeorgeOgboro LayoutandGraphics:RobiRedda,YordanosHaileandPacomeKossy Production:RobiReddaandPacomeKossy

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