Young African climate activists speak truth to power

At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, youth activists protested the continued subsidisation of fossil fuel companies by banks and governments. Amongst them was 23-year-old Ugandan climate activist, Vanessa Nakate. After the conference, Associated Press cropped her out of a group photo in which she posed with four other young attendees (including Greta Thunberg, the European face of youth Climate activism). Vanessa’s was the only African face in the photo.

“You erased a continent,” she tweeted in response.

This erasure is not new: Africans have long been silenced in the climate conversation.

“We are on the front line [of the crisis]”, Vanessa said, “but we are not on the front page”.

June is Youth Month, which seems a good time to reflect on the significant role that young people are playing in the fight for climate justice. While the youth have always stepped up to advocate for social and political change—racial justice, gender equality, the right to education—the scale at which they have taken up the climate mantle is unprecedented.

We must appreciate the powerful force that young activists have become in the fight for climate justice, including the courageous young African climate leaders who so rarely get the recognition they deserve.

Lived Experience

Activists from the Global South often have firsthand experience of the climate catastrophe that their compatriots in the North are protected from. Take 21-year old Ayakha Melithafa, for example. Born and bred in Eersterivier, South Africa, Ayakha was raised by her mother, a subsistence farmer. When a devastating drought hit the Western Cape in 2017, Ayakha’s family and community, their crops and livestock, all suffered. She began to research the causes of the drought, and learnt that it was no freak accident of nature but the consequence of a man-made climate crisis.

That day, her fight for climate justice began.

Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, a Ugandan environmental advocate and founder of the Fridays for Future movement, has a similar activist origin story. Hilda grew up subsisting on her family’s crops: bananas, corn, and cassava. But over the years, extreme weather events—“the heavy strong rains that washed away our crops and left the land bare, the constant dry spells that left the streams and wells dry”—became so frequent, her family had to sell off much of their farmland and livestock. Hilda’s father could not afford her school fees.

Like Ayakha, it was watching her family suffer that set Hilda on the path to environmental activism.

Years later, their fight is ongoing.

The Global South Bears the Brunt

For too many citizens of developing countries, climate catastrophes are not scary hypotheticals; they are lived realities. A deadly combination of geographical, infrastructural, and socio-economic factors, means citizens of the Global South, like Hilda and Ayakha, will continue to be the hardest hit by the climate crisis.

Africa is home to 15% of the world’s population but accounts for only 2-3% of the world’s carbon emissions. Because affluent Western countries are so disproportionately responsible for a crisis whose most acute harms are suffered by the Global South, there is growing pressure on the West to financially support the South’s green transition. In Vanessa Nakate’s words, “Those with the fewest resources and who’ve contributed the least to the crisis are contending with the gravest consequences.” Decarbonising an economy is costly, and Africa is owed reparations.

The West has repeatedly promised to cough up. African youth activists have been vocal about the emptiness of said promises.

Ahead of her trip to COP26 in Glasgow, Ayakha said, “It’s important for South Africans like me and others to be present at COP26, because if we don’t make them uncomfortable, and if we don’t ask these difficult questions about finance and investing in the Global South, then who will?”.

In 2019, when she was 22 years old, Hilda addressed hundreds of delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and she did not mince her words: “I come here to represent millions of African young people who are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis,” she said.

“As I speak to you right now, extreme weather events are killing people in my country.”

At the C40 summit in Copenhagen, Hilda said, “Your beds might be comfortable now, but not for long. You will soon feel the same heat we feel every day.”

The youth speak truth to power freely and honestly. It is vital to have young people representing Africa on the global stage because, in Hilda’s words, “Africans do not deserve to suffer a crisis we never created”.

An African Voice

Getting cropped out of that infamous photo in Davos made Vanessa Nakate realise the true significance of her role in the environmental movement. The climate conversation was missing African voices, so she would bring her African voice.

Since then, Vanessa has been unrelenting in her work of getting African activists that spot on the front page, that seat at the negotiating table. She has spoken at conferences, given interviews (including one with Angelina Jolie for Time magazine), and received countless awards and accolades (BBC named her in their ‘100 Women in 2020’). Vanessa founded the Green Schools Project in October 2019, a programme which helps Ugandan schools transition to renewable energy. In 2022, her first book was published: “A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis”.

Africa is the world’s youngest continent by citizen age, and it is only getting younger. By 2050, it is predicted that one in three young people globally will be African, and its activists are determined to create a better world for them to live in. Speaking at the C40 summit in Copenhagen to a room of mostly European adults, Hilda said: “Rest assured that youth from the other side of the world are fighting for a safe future for you and for us all and [we] are not about to give up.”