International kick-off workshop

Dar es Salaam, 14 to 16 November 2011. The pilot phase of the Service Agency's project '50 Municipal Climate Partnerships by 2015' kicked off with the international workshop held in Dar es Salaam from 14 to 16 November 2011. This was the first time delegates from all the participating municipalities in the four countries of Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania and Germany met in order to discuss the next steps of the project. The workshop agenda included items such as sharing the various local lessons learned with climate change and adaptation, a survey of expectations of the project and the work of the partnerships, bilateral talks within the municipal partnerships, and sufficient time for networking by the municipal actors.

Another issue raised was how to develop a joint programme of action in municipal climate partnerships, which is an explicit objective of the project. By subsequently implementing their programmes of action the municipal partnerships will make their local contributions towards global climate change mitigation, and adaptation to the changing conditions of life in their locality.

Day one focused chiefly on enabling participants to get to know each other and to network, and on presentation of the project. On day two, an excursion within Dar es Salaam gave participants their first impressions of the infrastructural challenges in this city of over one million inhabitants. The visit to a landfill, for instance, highlighted one possible climate change-related area of activity for municipal partnerships. Getting there and back also provided participants with an excellent opportunity to familiarise themselves with the everyday traffic situation on the roads of Dar es Salaam.

The final day of the workshop revolved around technical details and the conditions attached to the climate change project. At the same time the project team outlined the timetable for further municipal cooperation within the project, and mapped out the next milestones to the year 2015. The participants demonstrated a firm resolve to take joint action at the local level in order to tackle climate change.

After the workshop several delegations from Germany took the opportunity to visit their respective partner municipalities. For some this was the first visit to their partner municipality. This was therefore a good opportunity to firm things up in the new partnership and explore possible areas for joint cooperation.

The inputs and the results of the workshop will shortly be forwarded to participants in the form of proceedings, which will also be made available to all interested readers on the Service Agency's website. To prepare for the international workshop in Tanzania, representatives of the ten German municipalities participating in the pilot phase had met at a workshop held in Bonn on 4 to 5 October 2011. The proceedings of this workshop are available in German and English, and were made available to the African partners in Dar es Salaam.