01/08/2026
🌍 Changemakers Lab – July Edition Recap
Designing an Inclusive Climate Change Adaptation Programme
The July edition of the Changemakers Lab, hosted by Development Impact Pathfinders Initiative (Devimpath), convened development practitioners, programme designers, researchers, students, and climate advocates for an engaging conversation on what it truly means to design climate adaptation programmes that leave no one behind.
Facilitated by Glory Amara Otuojor, Executive Director of Devimpath, the webinar highlighted that climate change affects people differently based on gender, age, disability, livelihoods, and socio-economic circumstances. Women often experience increased caregiving responsibilities and livelihood pressures, while climate-induced displacement can expose women and girls to heightened protection risks, including gender-based violence and interrupted education for young people.
Glory therefore, challenged participants to move beyond tokenistic inclusion and adopt practical approaches that ensure adaptation interventions respond to the diverse realities of women, persons with disabilities, young people, older persons, indigenous communities, and other groups at risk of being left behind.
🌱 Key Learning Highlights
The webinar emphasized that inclusive climate adaptation begins long before project implementation. It starts with intentional planning that identifies vulnerable and marginalized groups and actively integrates their needs, knowledge, and voices throughout the project cycle.
Participants explored practical strategies for designing more equitable adaptation programmes, including:
✅ Identifying groups with a high risk of being left behind and intentionally integrating their needs into project planning.
✅ Conducting meaningful community consultations to understand local priorities and ensure interventions are driven by community needs rather than external assumptions.
✅ Co-creating solutions with community members, recognising them as partners and knowledge holders rather than passive beneficiaries.
✅ Incorporating indigenous knowledge and local adaptation practices alongside scientific evidence to strengthen resilience.
✅ Using local languages or engaging facilitators who speak indigenous languages to improve communication and participation.
✅ Scheduling project activities around local realities such as market days, farming seasons, religious activities, and prevailing security conditions to maximise participation.
✅ Ensuring venues and project activities are accessible to persons with disabilities and addressing barriers to participation from the outset.
✅ Involving community members throughout monitoring, evaluation, and learning processes to promote accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
💡 Participants Discussions
Participants shared experiences from communities across Nigeria, highlighting shifting rainfall patterns, flooding, declining agricultural productivity, rising food prices, migration, and increasing pressure on livelihoods.
They also examined how technology can strengthen climate adaptation through:
📡 Early warning systems using satellite and radar data.
📱 Digital dissemination of weather forecasts through mobile phones and community radio.
🚜 Precision agriculture and portable irrigation technologies to reduce dependence on increasingly unpredictable rainfall.
🌾 Locally driven adaptation strategies such as avoiding cultivation in flood-prone areas, expanding dry-season irrigation, improving water management through dredging, and strengthening climate information services for farming communities.
A special contribution by Professor Omotayo B. Adeboye introduced participants to the PISTA Project, demonstrating how innovation and sustainable irrigation can improve agricultural resilience across Africa.
🌍 Webinar Outcomes
Through the session, participants:
✔ Strengthened their understanding of gender-responsive and socially inclusive climate adaptation programming.
✔ Gained practical tools for integrating inclusion into every stage of project design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.
✔ Explored how technology, indigenous knowledge, and community participation can work together to build resilient communities.
✔ Shared experiences and lessons from different parts of Nigeria, creating opportunities for peer learning and collaboration.
✔ Established new connections with climate experts and practitioners to support continued learning and future partnerships.
A heartfelt thanks to all participants whose questions and reflections made the session truly interactive.
At Development Impact Pathfinders Initiative (Devimpath), we believe that climate adaptation is most effective when it is inclusive, locally driven, evidence-informed, and designed with—not just for—the people it intends to serve.
📅 Missed this edition? Join us next month as Changemakers Lab continues to bring together changemakers committed to building equitable, climate-resilient communities.
