The communities from the project area are highly patriarchal but lately there has been a movement to include women in decision making. In the JMC formation and subsequent transition to a CBO, the communities adopted the government policy of having not less than 30% of women in the committee. The interventions in rain water harvesting will help address both health and gender concerns identified in the action plans. Women spend an inordinate amount of time fetching water from sources that are not clean. Indeed, in many of the intervention envisaged in this proposal women and other disadvantaged groups are the major beneficiaries. Women will have improved livelihoods through production of vegetables for sale to local ranches.

The goal of the CBO is to bring together smallholder agricultural and pastoralist residents of these areas to undertake and promote natural resource management practices that ensure sustainability of the resources whilst addressing the issues of land degradation, climate change mitigation and alternative and compatible livelihoods.

The stakeholders were involved and will continue to be involved in the following ways, i. During the formation of the JMC?s and subsequent transition to a CBO all adult residents of the villages were present to elect the seven representatives who form the committee. In two of the villages the JMC with facilitation from Zeitz Foundation conducted a Resource Use Assessment culminating in a Community Adaptive Action Plan. Majority of the issues being addressed in the project proposal are contained in the village action plans which will be appended to this proposal ii. A draft of this proposal has been presented to the community members for their input and to further the action plan that the communities did through the village adaptive planning exercise. Specific results in this proposal have been set by the adult residents through their respective JMC?s iii. Project implementation will be carried out by the CBO with assistance from Zeitz Foundation whose field staff are from the affected communities. It is envisaged that the timelines indicated in the community action plans will be used to conduct participatory project reviews. The overall goal arising out of their scenario planning exercise will be a guide in implementing the project and constantly aligning it to the community adaptive plan.