Support in the revision of Embassies’ MASPs, the case of Mozambique
From July until October 2013, DSU experts supported the embassies in Mozambique, Burundi and Rwanda in identifying critical climate, environment and gender aspects in their MASPs.
In the case of Mozambique the DSU team consisted of three Dutch experts and a Mozambican gender expert, specifically requested by the embassy. This turned out to be a very fruitful cooperation. According to embassy staff, it was good to hear that many climate and environmental aspects were already implicitly integrated in their programmes, but should be made more explicit. Following this advice, the embassy in Maputo recently asked the DSU for further support with the implementation of the recommendations, methodology development and M&E activities.
Direct links to DRR and climate change country profiles
Do you need more information on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change (CC) in your country? We would like to invite you to take a look at the DRR/CC table on the DSU website. It provides direct access to the most informative profiles and the profiles most referred to by for instance the World Bank Group, Prevention-Web, UNDP, EM-DAT, Cordaid, SIDA, and the countries themselves. The links are accessible per DGIS partner country. Also, the background document and key sheet on climate change and disaster risk reduction is available from the DSU website.
As from July 2013 the DSU expanded its services with advice on women’s rights and gender equality, particularly within water and food security programming. These services will be available for another 6 months, until July 2014. For this specific expertise, Saskia Ivens has joined the DSU team. We can offer the following support:
identification of opportunities in the fields of gender equality and women’s rights for MASPs, and operationalisation of these opportunities in proposed programming;
organisation and implementation of context analyses and gender impact studies;
improvement of monitoring and results measurement;
Some of the embassies and DGIS departments have been contacted in the last month to provide input for the independent evaluation of the DSUs first year of operation. The evaluation of the inception phase was intended to discuss possible adjustments to the DSU ToR. The first conclusions on both the quality of our advice and our working procedures are positive. Recommendation for further improvement, such as M&E (outcome and impact) of our advisory services and website development are taken at heart. The draft evaluation report is currently being finalised, after which it will be available from our website.
Coming soon: new DSU website
The DSU is working on a new website. A new design, better search facilities, information organised per country and other features will provide easy access to DSU activities, advisory reports, and news. For now however, you can find this information on the NCEA’s website.
In the DSU newsletters, the DSU (core) team will be shortly introduced. This time we introduce the new DSU coordinator, Sibout Nooteboom, who has recently taken over this responsibility from Rob Verheem.
Sibout is specialist in environmental policy, environmental assessment and process management. He has been involved in policy making processes in many layers and sectors of government, the past 10 years predominantly as process facilitator. He worked for over 20 years for DHV, an international engineering and project management consultancy; 4 years for the ministry of Internal Affairs as consultant for organisation and management issues, and for more than 6 years as a senior researcher of Public Administration at the Erasmus University on a parttime basis. He joined the NCEA in 2012 and is DSU coordinator since November 2013. Sibout on his new role: “I am looking forward to discuss with embassy and department staff easy accessibly support, tailored to their specific needs. Also streamlining services with other knowledge institutes will be one of my focal points as the new DSU coordinator.”
