Civil Society Workshop with the Independent Redress Mechanism of the Green Climate Fund

Within the framework of a series of workshops started by the Arab Watch Regional Coalition in supporting and strengthening the capacities of Civil Society Organizations in the MENA region with regards to various mechanisms of filing and submitting complaints on IFIs’ projects; a workshop was held today, Saturday, April 3, with the Independent Redress Mechanism (IRM) of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). It’s the mechanism responsible for receiving complaints from affected (or might be affected) communities and individuals, with relation to a GCF projects or programmes.

Simultaneous interpretation in both Arabic and English was ensured during 4 hours of the workshop that brought together the Arab Watch Coalition organizations’ members and a number of active environmental CSOs from countries of the GCF operations in the MENA region, namely Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan along with the IRM/GCF representatives: Mr. Lalanath de Silva, Head of the IRM; Ms. Christine Reddell, Registrar and Case Officer; Mr. Paco Gimenez-Salinas, Compliance and Dispute Resolution Specialist and Sue Kyung Hwang from the IRM working group; who have discussed the functionality of the IRM and provided all the answers raised during the workshop.

This workshop’s main objectives were to ensure that CSOs have full access to information on projects financed by the GCF, to enable them to request information on these projects, to provide clarifications on access to the IRM, and to support affected people in submitting complaints to this mechanism, and this was accomplished through practical exercises on specific projects in the GCF website.

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