The EU global climate change alliance and least developed countries in East Africa

Abstract

Up till the twentieth century, climate change was a disregarded issue. In 1987, the Brundtland report on ‘Our Common Future’, raised consciousness about our rapidly changing world. Nevertheless, today, prominent figures are still in denial of the existence of this phenomenon. Climate change has no boundaries; it affects every rich and developing country, every species on the planet. It is a fact, that the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is heating the earth, at a faster rate than ever before, affecting negatively primarily the least developed countries (LDCs) and small islands developing states (SIDs). In light of this, the European Union stood up as a global leader to fight climate change. This research investigates the EU’s competence in helping LDCs in tackling climate change effects. This work implies, an examination of the EU’s Global Climate Change Alliance (GCCA) in assisting east African countries to combat drought. In all six diversified projects are analysed. Projects were classified according to their relevance to droughts, and then six were chosen, the three most financed and the three least financed. The content analysis method was used to code, all mentions relevant to drought, found in the literature. This type of coding uses the creation of a set of keywords which are subsumed into major topics. The keywords were tested to determine the term relevancy. This is known as term saliency. The salient mentions for each keyword were coded according to a scale 0-4, 0 being no mentions, 4 being salient mention of high importance. This method was applied in each project document, and, proved to be vital for analysing the listed objectives as well as the rate of success of the projects. This content analysis method examined the uneven attention given to the nine central themes and their respective keywords in all six the projects. This emphasised the GCCA’s competence to focus on specific aspects while forgoing others. Descriptive statistics were used, to illustrate and quantify the focus and success of these projects. The results of this study contribute to a critical examination of the EU’s GCCA to help East African countries to tackle droughts by offering technical and financial assistance in various areas. However, the extent of GCCA help effectiveness varied in all projects due to several factors.