WHAT WE DO
Campaigns
At the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), we are committed to driving transformative change across Africa through our dynamic campaigns. Our initiatives are designed to amplify the voices of communities on the frontlines of climate change, advocate for equitable policies, and hold global leaders accountable for their environmental commitments.
At the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), our campaigns are at the forefront of advocating for climate justice across the continent. Our flagship initiatives, the Keep Your Promise Campaign, the Climate Justice Torch Campaign and the ongoing Climate and Economic Justice Campaign, exemplify our commitment to holding global leaders accountable and amplifying African voices in the climate discourse.
Key Campaigns:
Climate and Economic Justice Campaign
The Climate and Economic Justice Campaign is a people-powered movement grounded in Africa’s lived realities, collective struggles, and bold aspirations for justice.
Across the continent, communities are facing the brunt of climate breakdown — from failed rains and flash floods to food insecurity and displacement. Yet these same communities also grapple with long-standing economic injustices rooted in extractive systems, colonial legacies, and skewed global financial architectures. For Africa, the climate crisis is not just environmental; it is deeply economic, social, and historical.
The African Union’s 2025 theme on reparations, restitution, and justice comes at a pivotal moment. It echoes a call long made by African movements: that historical and ongoing exploitation must be acknowledged and repaired. Climate justice cannot be achieved without economic justice — and neither can be realized without a reckoning with the past. This campaign rises to that challenge.
As we chart the road toward COP30, this campaign seeks to amplify African voices, demand accountability from historical emitters, and push for a just transition that prioritizes the needs of people over profit. It’s about shifting power, rewriting narratives, and ensuring that Africa is not just present at the table — but shaping the agenda.
Africa is pivotal, endowed with vast natural resources, a growing youthful population, and expanding markets that offer immense potential for sustainable and inclusive development. However, this potential remains largely untapped due to persistent structural injustices in the global financial and economic systems. In response, in Africa, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), in collaboration with the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) and on behalf of the extensive coalition engaged in the economic justice campaign, is convening both a physical and virtual launch of the climate and economic justice campaign.
Collective Demands
Below are our collective global demands that may be adapted at the national level according to national contexts.
Cancel the Debt and New Debt Architecture
- Cancel unsustainable and illegitimate debts, including those owed to private lenders and commercial banks.
- Create a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt that includes a debt workout mechanism replacing the power of the IMF, G20 and informal groups such as the London Club and Paris Club.
End the Rigged Financial System to End Global Inequality
- Create a new International Financial Architecture. Put an end to the colonial international financial architecture established at Bretton Woods, 80 years ago, and promote a more democratic and representative structure of global economic governance.
- Accelerate progress on agreeing to a binding UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation to close loopholes, stop the race to the bottom, address tax evasion and illicit financial flows and end the use of tax havens.
- Establish a UN Convention on International Development Cooperation. Ensure that donor countries meet or exceed their 0.7 per cent ODA commitments and comply with the principles of aid effectiveness. Create new Special Drawing Rights with an allocation based on needs and not quotas.
- Address inequalities at the national level, especially in budget allocations, expenditure priorities, gender transformative budgeting, internal tax policies and the development of time-bound plans and budgets to implement universal social protection. Strengthening regional cooperation and the coordination of policies that seek to overcome inequalities.
Public Services and End Privatisation
- End austerity measures, including public sector wage bill constraints, and adequately fund quality public services, such as health care, education, and universal social protection. End labour market deregulation, support decent work including living wages, and adopt fair budget allocations, equitable spending priorities and strong public services to address the root causes of inequality.
- End the privatisation and commercialisation of public services and bring previously privatised services back into accountable public hands. Invest in quality universal public services – including social infrastructure and sexual and reproductive health services — for all.
- Tax the richest, not the poorest. Implement progressive, transparent, gender-transformative tax systems, introduce wealth taxes on the super-rich, and combat illicit financial flows to claw back the public money that has become private wealth.
Finance Climate Justice
- Demand that countries in the Global North pay their climate debts: Countries with recognised historic responsibilities for pollution must pay their climate debt to countries in the Global South through grant-based finance. Recognise that the COP29 agreement of US$300 billion per year falls far short of the trillions of dollars that are truly required and owed.
- Reject all loan-based climate finance. You cannot pay climate debt by giving loans to already indebted countries! Mobilising finance for adaptation, mitigation, and a just transition is an existential priority that cannot be delayed.
- Finance decentralized and democratised energy systems that put power in the hands of communities, not fossil fuel corporations. Those least served by the current failed fossil fuel energy system deserve to be first in line for clean, affordable energy.
Build Rights-Based Economies
- Radically increase equality, creating equitable economic systems designed to deliver sustainable development, human rights, gender justice, and climate justice. All governments should set clear time-bound plans to rapidly reduce economic inequality so that the bottom 40% have the same income as the top 10%. Replace GDP growth and per capita income as dominant economic measures and adopt new metrics for feminist well-being economies, incorporating key inequality, environmental and social indicators and building towards a Nonviolent Economy.
- Stop corporate and other elite capture: Break up multinational monopolies, keep corporate money out of politics, ensure highly progressive corporate taxation, implement triple bottom lines that account for environmental and social impact, and eliminate investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms.
- Stop promoting private investment to the detriment of public investment, as well as ‘innovative financing mechanisms’ that only seek to commodify nature and development.
- Pursue full employment and strengthen labour rights: Implement economic strategies deliberately aimed at full employment while strengthening labour rights and standards to ensure decent work and living wages. Tackle gender, ethnic, descent and racial discrimination at the workplace, including related pay gaps.
- Promote trade justice. Reform the multilateral trading system to strengthen developing countries’ policy space for socio-economic transformation through agricultural, industrial, and labour policies aimed at resolving commodity dependence, strengthening local economies, advancing full employment and decent work, and transitioning to a sustainable energy base. This includes reforming investment regimes to curb financial speculation, ensuring taxation of multinational corporations and eliminating all clauses that limit the capacity of the state to regulate the economy in the public interest.
- Corporate accountability. Strengthen national and international regulations of global supply chains through the development of a binding UN treaty to regulate corporate power and mandatory due diligence legislation.
- Feminist Economic Justice. Economic policies foster systemic gender discrimination and result in women bearing the costs of austerity, financial crises and privatisation through unpaid care work. Governments must recognise unpaid care work as a valuable economic activity and reward care workers with fair compensation and benefits.
- Promote women’s economic rights — including access to employment, appropriate working conditions and control over economic resources — by fully implementing the Beijing Platform for Action, including reducing military expenditures and ensuring that the private sector complies with national and international law.
- Strengthen civil society participation and civic space to ensure public funds are not used for repressive state apparatuses and networks of patronage; instead, focus funding on direct support for community-level action by civil society groups, including support for feminist civil society organisations.
Keep Your Promise Campaign
This campaign, which ran for two consecutive years, sought to ensure that nations upheld their pledges under the Paris Agreement, emphasizing accountability and tangible action in the global climate agenda. Launched in 2023, the Keep Your Promise Campaign is a pivotal initiative aimed at ensuring that nations honor their commitments under the Paris Agreement. As we approach COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, this campaign emphasizes the urgency of translating pledges into tangible actions.
Our Objectives Include:
- Accountability: Monitoring and evaluating the progress of countries in meeting their climate finance and emission reduction targets.
- Transparency: Advocating for clear reporting mechanisms to track the allocation and utilization of climate funds.
- Equity: Ensuring that financial resources are directed towards the most vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by climate change.
Through grassroots mobilization, policy advocacy, and strategic partnerships, the Keep Your Promise Campaign strives to transform commitments into concrete actions that benefit African communities.
Climate Justice Torch Campaign
Launched during the Africa Climate Week in Libreville, Gabon in August 2022, this campaign highlighted the resilience of African communities facing climate challenges. It provided a platform for them to voice their concerns and influence international discussions.
Key Aspects of the Campaign:
- Awareness Raising: Highlighting the resilience and adaptive strategies of communities facing climate adversities.
- Youth Engagement: Empowering young climate activists to take leadership roles in advocating for sustainable policies.
- Policy Influence: Presenting a unified African voice in international climate negotiations, ensuring that the continent's unique challenges and solutions are recognized.
The torch serves as a beacon of hope and a call to action, symbolizing the collective resolve of African nations to pursue climate justice and sustainable development.
