CReLIC: Contract Signing Ceremony on Thursday, 12 March 2020 at LGED HQ, Dhaka – Bangladesh
In June 2019 we received the good news that we conceived a new “baby” – Consulting Services for the Establishment of the Climate Resilient Local Infrastructure Centre (CReLIC) under the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) in Bangladesh.
AMBERO-COMO-TTT joint venture (J.V.) won, beyond all expectations, the bid for this project.
And indeed, 9 months later, the CReLIC-project was born through the formal contract signing ceremony on 12 March 2020 at the LGED-headquarters in Dhaka.
But what is CReLIC?…
The Climate Resilient Local Infrastructure Centre (CReLIC) aims to be a Centre of Excellence as a permanent staff unit under LGED top management and will serve as a think-tank and knowledge hub to mainstream climate resilience into all LGED activities. The Centre will trigger a stepwise institutional learning process all over the LGED infrastructure portfolio and beyond.
This 4-year project will be responsible for institutionalizing and establishment of a knowledge management and information system for climate proofing in the planning, design, construction and maintenance of all local infrastructure; and setting of standards, procedures and guidelines for ensuring climate proofing.
The overarching Climate Resilience Infrastructure Mainstreaming (CRIM)-project, to which CReLIC is the Institutional Development component, includes also investments in rural and urban pilot infrastructures (components 2 & 3) in three of the country’s most vulnerable and poor coastal districts: Bhola, Barguna and Satkhira. As a result, the project aims to increase directly the adaptive capacity of more than 134,000 people to climate change. Indirectly, 10.4 million people (6.8 percent of the total population of the country) will benefit from climate resilient infrastructure planning and implementation in the long term.
The CRIM project has an overall budget of US$80 million. With a grant of US$40 million from the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The German Government through the German Development Bank (KfW) provides parallel co-financing of US$15 million and the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) a counterpart contribution of US$25 million. Additional co-financing is expected to be leveraged.
The Consulting Services for the Establishment of CReLIC, composed of a team of experts under the lead of team leader and organizational development specialist Bert van Ommen from the J.V. partners, referred to as the Institutional Development Consultant (IDC), will assist LGED in setting up and operationalizing CReLIC.
LGED is committed to setting up CReLIC permanently and the Government has assured that long-term operational costs will be covered by the national budget.
The activities described below will be executed jointly by the Project Management Office (PMO) with the CRIM Project Director as the head, and the responsible LGED units. All CReLIC related works will be supported by the IDC.
In particular, the IDC services include technical and institutional development support to LGED in achieving the following key outputs:
- A comprehensive data, information and knowledge management system within the LGED is field-tested and established to facilitate climate proofing in the planning, design, construction and maintenance of all local infrastructure on a sustainable basis;
- Climate resilient construction standards, procedures and guidelines of LGED are developed improved, field-tested and adapted;
- Necessary communications, consultations and training is provided for mainstreaming climate proofing throughout the LGED organization and their local partners; and
- The Climate Resilient Local Infrastructure Centre (CReLIC) is institutionalized as a permanent staff unit under the LGED top management.
Overall, the services will require designing and steering a comprehensive change process in a large organization and establishing a sustainable cooperation network on the national and international level.
