The E Co. team gathered on Friday, 11 November to celebrate 20 Years of E Co. and to share project design lessons, reflections from over the years, and enjoy music from world performers.
Thank you to all who attended for a lively event! It was wonderful to reconnect with our community and hear from all of you.
If you’d like to catch up on the insights and fun, we’ve shared the full replay below where you can listen to lessons learned by our consultants and some beautiful sounds from musicians, hailing from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Hear lessons from the team:
- If we had to do it all over again – 20 years of E Co. and what we’ve learned from Dr Grant Ballard-Tremeer
- Gender and social inclusion in climate finance from our experts Dr Silvia Emili and Alexandra Milano
- E Co’s work with climate funds from Morna Isaac
- Driving country ownership in climate finance readiness from Benjamin Bartle
Excerpt from Dr Grant Ballard-Tremeer’s speech:
So one of our core values as a company was then, and still is “listening, empathising, and being open and honest.” We make the effort to listen carefully to customers, co-workers, contractors and partners, and try to understand the issues they are dealing with from their point of view. We spend a lot more time listening and learning, so that when we speak or write, what we say or produce meets people’s needs.
For me, this should be our starting point when we think about climate finance and how to make a difference, and the lesson has been reinforced time and again over the years. We should start by seeking to understand how people do things, before we try to help people do things better. Sometimes this feels easier than at other times, but it always requires time and effort. Sometimes it is frustrating when clients do not allocate enough time to building up the understanding of needs and looking at the world through the eyes of the beneficiaries.
And this is a lesson that I personally have to learn again and again: to slow down from making assumptions and listening to my preconceived ideas, and look at the world from the eyes of others.
Listen to music from:
Sarah and David Nepomuceno (Philippines)
Domingos Presta (Brazil)
Asya Satti and Yazid Fentazi (Sudan and Algeria)
Couldn’t make the celebration?
Catch up by watching the replay below: