In today’s episode of The Arc, ECSP’s Claire Doyle and Angus Soderberg interview Joanita Babirye, Co-founder of Girls for Climate Action. Joanita shares about her firsthand experiences with climate stressors and the broader impact of climate change on women in Uganda. But it’s also a story of hope: She tells us about her work training over 300 women in climate action and facilitating climate demonstration hubs, underscoring the role that women and girls can play as catalysts for change in the face of the climate crisis.

On the inspiration behind her engagement on climate issues and how it has informed her journey as a climate leader.

In 2016, we faced a lot of issues. One was that there was a lot of flooding because we live near a wetland. I realized that we’re not the only ones facing the problem; all the households that were near us were facing the same problem. At some point, we normalize these kinds of conversations. In all of this, I really saw that my mother was the one taking an essential role in trying to make sure that the children don’t go with the rain and making sure that tomorrow comes.  So, this is where my activism started. Me and other girls in my community realized the importance of trying to stop investors from taking over the wetland. But we couldn’t do this because we were just girls trying to do things that were trying to push the government to move investors away. This is how Girls for Climate Action started—with a group of nine girls advocating for climate justice but centering our realities and experiences that we were going through at that time at the center of all the work that we’re doing at the moment. So since then, that’s where climate action has grown in different communities in Uganda.

On women as agents of change in the climate space.

The first time we did our climate education in communities was with my community, and they had an attachment because there was flooding, and they could say all they wanted was a solution. Most of these communities are dependent on agriculture. For them, it’s more that I don’t have food, I don’t have water, and I don’t have fire to cook my food—that’s their problem. So, you also understand where they’re coming from in regards to what is necessary for them at the moment, looking at the short term. So, we try it as much as possible to understand how we see them being affected and how we can bring them creative solutions.  For example, most women were spending a lot of time looking for water and firewood for cooking. And yet they would really be involved in other economic activities that they could gain even more from or become independent of. And so, we see them affected. And when a man comes back home and they do not find any food, they’ll have to blame the woman for not getting food. And that is what really results in gender-based violence. We see that women also become stressed out; they miss out on all the possibilities of standing up and saying there’s no food because of certain reasons… So how do we bridge the gap to make women access these different resources easily, and also try to bring the concept of why it’s happening and their solution?

On how Girls for Climate Action trains young women.

We’ve try as much as possible to target young women and girls in communities that are prone to climate change. It means that these girls have already seen things happen, just like the way Girls for Climate Action started—I experienced it—this is turning into my reality, and it’s an experience that I’ve gone through. So, from that angle, how do we also engage as many young women as possible to try to change things in their own communities? We do a lot of mapping for them to understand where the problem is—what we call that eco mapping—to understand which ecosystems within your community are being threatened. And if they’re being threatened, what’s the threat, what is it that we can do, and how are they going to be threatened? Who are the different stakeholders that we can target for this kind of thing? They also map out different ecosystems that are very important and how they are benefiting from them. So, when they mark them, when they map them, we are aware that they imagine this particular ecosystem disappearing and what the community would lose.

 On the challenges she has faced in her work.

So, what we’re trying to say is, how can we break down and dismantle these systems that are limiting women from being part of this conversation for decision-making processes? So, when you get into communities, we try as much as possible to engage cultural leaders. But we’ve also engaged local leaders before we engaged the women. By the time we get into the community, the cultural leaders know us, the local leaders know us, and they know what you’re going to talk about and what our suggestions would look like. So, after this training in the local communities, it’s easy to say that the woman should take on a certain role. So, we’ve had a bit of change in that sense.