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Dunia Baroud El-Khoury has just returned to her home in Lebanon after representing WeCaN at the UNCCD 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP) in Abidjian, Côte d’ivoire. Over the span of thirty years, Dunia has cultivated the project WADA, in Deir El Ahmar, which caught the attention of FAO's WeCaN initiative at the beginning of 2022. The latter invited Dunia to join forces and later asked her to represent WeCaN at the UNCCD CoP15 for her to share her experiences as a woman champion in empowering women and combatting desertification.

Dunia began her project in 1991 when she married her husband and moved to the rural Deir El Ahmar. Immediately, she understood the potential of the area - the earth was rich and home to some spectacular historical attractions such as the churches of Saydet el Borj and Bechouat, the remnants of the temple of Jupiter, the Iaat column, the Roman road (to name just a few), as well as the natural beauty of the area with springs and cedar forests. However, the economic situation was poor and migration away from the region to Beirut and abroad was commonplace.

Dunia called on the women to better the situation. They had no funds and no experience, but they embarked upon a venture that has now gathered international attention. They started with handicrafts, something the women were familiar with, and presented legal documents to the Ministry of the Interior to assure that the Women’s Association of Deir El Ahmar (the name they gave to the organization) became a recognized NGO. Later they contacted the Ministry of Agriculture to ask for land, on which they built a community center - they surrounded it with a garden, contacted the Ministry of Tourism and encouraged people to host tourists and later, bungalows were built to offer further accommodation to the growing number of visitors. 

Later WADA was awarded the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment for its initiative entitled “Women’s Contribution to Sustainable Rural Development”. Year on year this initiative has continued to grow and we can see how from the local, WADA went to the regional, to the national, to the international. Now Dunia is flushed from the success at the UNCCD CoP where not only was she able to talk on behalf of WeCaN, but to present her organization to a new audience.  In fact, the UNCCD focal point from Egypt, when visiting Lebanon in June, will call upon WADA to enjoy the activities, the landscape, and the historical attractions Deir El Ahmar has to offer.

At the end of Dunia’s time at the CoP she helped draft a Gender CSO Statement which pushed for further recommendations to be added the roadmap of the CoP which, in her opinion, was insufficient in ensuring the mainstreaming of gender justice and effective participation of women and girls. She believed it was far from enough to guarantee women’s equitable access to all the benefits that sustainable land use can provide. The four suggestions she presented for action were:

1)     Ensure that the Gender Action Plan is not a stand-alone within the CoP discussions by also adding gender experts to the SPI and other subsidiary bodies within the UNCCD;

2)     Foster active cooperation between UNCCD and UNWOMEN to ensure a more inclusive implementation of the Convention;

3)     Make sure that the Gender Caucus and Youth Caucus reflect on the available documents and improve them where necessary; and

4)     Monitor policy impact on vulnerable populations and disaggregate data to gender and age.

And the five recommendations were:

1)     Promote leadership capacity-building among women and women-led organizations;

2)     More strongly facilitate the participation of women-led organizations in the CoP and other global negotiations to raise their needs;

3)     Ensure a gender-sensitive financing and resource mobilization mechanism, which includes gender-specific budgeting within the UNCCD;

4)     Ensure regional co-operation and South-South experience sharing to improve women’s abilities to disseminate their voices, needs and knowledge; and

5)     Finally, promote involvement of women in research institutions to make sure their knowledge production and sharing is fostered. 

Undoubtedly, Dunia has come a long way, made striding progress over the years and will encourage other women to make the arduous journey towards participating at the decision-making level. This will surely happen, but as Dunia says, “we need leadership, we need champions”. It is fair to say that Dunia definitely leads, and is definitely a champion.