Faced with a “disconnected” West, young Africans raise their voices

With a Western world “completely out of touch” with reality, young Africans are raising their voices to finally be heard and hold polluting countries accountable as they suffer the worst effects of climate change.

In this COP27 that takes place in Egypt, the first time on the African continent since 2016, young people from different countries in this part of the world have taken this unique opportunity to connect and gather all the experiences to come back with the necessary tools to teach about climate change to your local community.

Kenyan Philip Owiti Dinga, 37, a member of the Panafrican Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), told EFE that he does not believe that African voices are forgotten, but that “they are not given what they need, since there is a large a growing movement of young people connecting through these climate summits so they can bring technologies and lessons back to their native countries.

In a language they understand

But the most important thing for these young Africans is outreach, being able to go back to their rural places and educate people of all generations dependent on the sectors most affected by climate change in a language that everyone understands.

Tsaone Amogelang Mokwatsu, 29, from Botswana, is dedicated to horticulture at the Nairobi Summer School on Climate Justice, a center created in 2021 in Kenya specialized in guiding the youngest so that they have the tools available to say what they say. is really climate change and how to combat it in your local communities.

Mokwatsu was grateful that these annual summits exist so that Africans can meet and that “those who have no voice can be heard”, but regretted that not everyone can come to this type of event due to lack of funding.

He gave a very clear example. She comes from a small rural area in Botswana and says that when she goes to a farm where a lot of older people work, she shows them that “climate change exists” because of delayed harvests or because of the amount of rainfall that floods their fields.

Mokwatsu said that they carry out various activities to break that difficult and scientific language that abounds in the reports of specialized agencies, such as “art, poetry, reading books or music”, and pointed out that they precisely need “that talent to identify what is happening and what we can do to understand it.

One of the central issues of this COP27 is being the point of loss and damage, which refers to compensation to the poorest countries by the most developed for their responsibility for historical emissions.

In fact, it is the first time that this issue has been included in a climate summit agenda, to which some countries, such as the United States, are reluctant.

Dinga stated that the West “is completely disconnected from the global context” in which they do not take into account “the cultural elements of the African continent”, something that can be seen in their position “on the question of loss and damage”.

But, especially, they are “disconnected from the youth,” he said.

Find the original story in Spanish here: https://efeverde.com/occidente-desconectado-jovenes-africanos-alzan-voces/