Niue Community-Centred Sustainable Development

  • Niue
  • Pacific

ENTRY DATE: 09.03.2012 | LAST UPDATE: 09.03.2012

SCALE:

  • Community Level

TARGET AREA:

  • Rural

BEST PRACTICE IN:

  • Capacity Building

KEY SECTOR:

  • Gender

FUNDING AMOUNT:

  • USD 100,001 - USD 500,000

Description of Intervention

The Community-Centred Sustainable Development Programme is a community-centred joint initiative of the Governments of the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tokelau and the UN, which enables community members to organise for collective action, by pooling resources and building solidarity towards resolving common problems and achieving a shared vision for community advancement.

Problems to be Addressed

Despite constitutional guarantees, men and women across the Pacific do not have the same opportunities when it comes to decision-making, accessing justice, and participating in the economy. For development to benefit both women and men of the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, and Tokelau, and the UNDP promotes gender equality across all of its work. The aim is to incorporate—into all key development programmes—clear gender equity targets and accountability for meeting these, particularly for making real inroads towards increasing the income of women at the household level through more and better jobs, and access to health care and education. Women in the Pacific, generally defer to the men for decision-making and leadership, often at their expense. Therefore, the MCO has intensified its efforts to bring about a change at both the policy and community levels through training of village leaders in good governance principles and human rights.

Aims

The project aims to:
• Create model villages, whereby a diverse and complimentary array of projects are holistically integrated into one coherent strategy within a village;
• Build on successful ongoing projects, and transform past transactional projects into sustainable projects;
• Link up with the Council for Regional Organisations in the Pacific (CROP) and other UN agencies, major donors, NGOs, CSOs and other initiatives in order to harmonise development initiatives; and
• Share best practices, engage in a process of cross-fertilisation of ideas and build national/local capacity.

Objectives

The CCSDP’s overall objectives are:
• To build gender-sensitive community capacity to sustainably manage environmental and income-generating initiatives that emanate from and through community-led planning processes; and
• To support communities in building an eco-friendly economy that incorporates climate change adaptation and risk-reduction measures.

How it fits into the EbA concept

During the village consultations for VSDP preparation, measures to promote sustainable ecosystem services such as replanting trees and protecting coastal areas from further erosion were discussed and people during the initial consultations were told to conserve the environment and keep it clean and green. But no specific efforts have been done in the project for promoting this component.
 
The three sub-components of Sustainable Environment Management – compliment LED initiatives through a focus on building a diverse “green economy”, strengthening capacity to adapt to climate change, and reducing the risk of disasters, needs strategic focus to make impact in the limited one year project period.