Changing how climate investments are designed to build resilience in Burkina Faso

In the climate-change affected municipality of Didyr in Burkina Faso a group of women were given something most climate programmes never offer: a voice in deciding what gets built, and then the skills to build it themselves.

Under the Least Developed Countries Initiative for Efficient Adaptation and Resilience (LIFE-AR), women in Didyr got to chose investments that would build community resilience to climate change. And the investment they chose, based on their own assessment of need, was improved cookstoves. They hope for long-lasting impacts that go well beyond cleaner air: the decreased wood consumption will ease pressure on already-fragile forests, while reducing CO2 emissions. The improved stoves are built with banco, clay bricks and cement instead of loose stones, leading to optimised control of air supply and better thermal insulation. Already, wood consumption has been reduced by 30% since the stoves were put in use.

More importantly, the stoves are a tool for women empowerment in their communities. By reducing the time spent collecting fuelwood and cooking (the improved stoves allow a reduction of 26 to 30% of cooking time), they free up time for women to engage in income-generating activities, educate their children and participate more fully in socio-economic life. In addition, the investment made provisions to train the women to become producers and distributors of the stoves themselves, turning a climate intervention into an economic one. In Dydir, women targeted by the initial trainings are already teaching other women in the construction of the stove. They also already started the production of clay bricks.

What makes this resilient story stand out though is the machinery behind them. LIFE-AR is a rare initiative designed to hand power downward: the aim is for 70% of all climate funding to flow directly to investments chosen by local communities, not by donors. Before any money moved in Burkina Faso, the country spent years building its governance structures and implementing local processes: a national steering committee overseen by a national body on climate change, local technical teams embedded in pilot municipalities, and community-led vulnerability assessments. The national team built its own capacity while doing the preliminary work to enable those investments: there were no external consultants parachuting in with ready-made solutions. This is climate adaptation intentionally designed from the ground up, allowing finance reach the people who need it most and let them decide on how best to spend it.