Oral Histories
Bhavya George
Climate Change Program Coordinator for the Keystone Foundation, India. Bhavya works with several rural communities – to bring women into village consultations – to monitor the ways conservation actions are impacting natural resources. To do this, she forms groups of female-barefoot ecologists to monitor the natural spaces on their farms:
“One of the changes that people noticed is how the forest is getting darker. “Iruttu” in Tamil means “dark.” They always mention how their forest is becoming dark, which was not the case earlier. Because it’s a deciduous forest, which should be more of a mix of grassland and some tall trees in between, it’s a tiger landscape … They say the tree phenology has changed, and the ecological flow of the water has changed. This is one perception that the community links with climate change, how all these changes in the forest are creating issues related to the scarcity of food and fodder and water for the wildlife there, which is pushing the wildlife to come into the village spaces and raid more crops.”
Fatou Ndoye
Coordinator of the Food Security Pole of Enda Graf Sahel, Senegal. Fatou worked with Enda Graf Sahel for 27 years to strengthen the capacities of women, which encompassed building networks among women who work in the food sector and ensuring that they can contribute to food security and even food sovereignty.
“In 2014, when I returned to the Saloum Delta region with the support of an NGO project The World According to Women (LMSF), I was genuinely surprised at the impacts of climate change. The coconut palms that had lined the sea were on the ground, houses were flattened, the road leading to the pier was so narrow that I wondered if a vehicle would ever be able to reach its destination. In addition, women in the community had to borrow canoes to search for shells far out in the ocean as they walked to the edge of the shore to fill their basin with products. This is how I truly understood how climate change was ravaging this island area.”
Fatoumata Fall
As facilitator and community liaison with Enda Graf Sahel, Fatoumata Fall works with Fatou Ndoye to assist women fishers, agriculturalists, and entrepreneurs in the Saloum Delta as they struggle to provide for their families in the context of a rapidly changing natural environment. Born and raised in the region, Fatoumata knows well the complex and fragile Delta biosphere, where savannah, intertidal mangroves, and saltwater vegetation support abundant wildlife, including birds along the East Atlantic Flyway. Fluent in Serer, Pular, and Wolof, as well as in French, Fatoumata provides a critical link between the scattered and often isolated island villages and the resources and support made available through climate activism.
“One can easily see that there is a rural exodus—an underground migration– occurring due to the scarcity of rain…those who used to live off the income from fishing have difficulty surviving. Their best recourse is to attempt to migrate.“
Tonya Gayle
Executive Director of Green City Force, USA. Tonya works with women leaders to uplift young people in low-income communities and build green infrastructure, construction, green construction, urban agriculture, solar, other clean energy types of roles. She centers her narratives on the values of “potential” and “talents” to uplift youth to be a force that highlights the need and power of thriving communities across the city.
“I’m now involved in something called Rainproof, NYC, which, 20 years ago, would never have been a thing. Now, we’re trying to understand solutions to climate issues that were used in the American South and all these other areas. The work we did during Superstorm Sandy is a great example of all we did on the ground for those in public housing … Historically, women have always been involved in nonprofit work. You could debate whether they’ve been the drivers in climate. To some extent, the answer is, yes … not surprisingly, women just get things done. They figure it out. But that shouldn’t have to be the case.”
Menya Muzamiru
Executive Director at Rural Country Development Organisation (RUCODE), Uganda. Mr. Menya assembled a group of eight activists – journalists, social workers, teachers, pre-med students, businesspeople, and engineers – to discuss how and why they work together to help women and girls stand up against male-dominated societies to lead climate change initiatives.
“We are scaling up and linking up with various networks – individuals, organizations, faith-based groups, and experts in various fields of business … Now this is a [rural] women’s movement, inspiring and motivating others to start up and strengthen their businesses. When you look at the people who have given their testimonies today, some of them are individual women entrepreneurs, some of them are women leaders in their companies, some of them are working in networks. They are ALL working as women for a common cause…”
Peninah Nthenya Musyimi
Founder of Awesome Blossoms and Safe Spaces. In the Mathare slums where she grew up, Peninah creates safe spaces for women and girls who are subject to rape and unwanted pregnancies and teaches them skills, including hydroponic farming.
“Their lands are dry, the rivers have dried, and the seasons have changed dramatically. It’s not like the usual planting season – every time, everything is changing. When they expect rain, it’s sunny; and when they expect sun, it’s raining. This has really affected the planting seasons in the rural homes and the wells and rivers have dried, too, forcing them now to start scrambling to move into the cities in search of livelihoods… My family was so poor that we would starve most of the time. Neither of my parents went to school and my dad had been brought up traditionally especially in the attitude of keeping girls at home … Our tradition is that when girls reach a certain age, they should be married off. In the patriarchy, we are educated to believe that boys get wealth for themselves.”
Naiyan Kiplagat
Naiyan Kiplagat. Founder and Executive Director of the Paran Women Group in the Maasai and Ogiek minority communities in Kenya. It was formed by indigenous women as a Community Based organization (CBO) in a village that was inhabited by a population of approximately 60,000 residents.
“The Ogiek and the Maasai are pastoralists … their animals now were affected by climate change because there were no pastures for them. They had to move from place to place, and those were men. They leave women behind, and the women remain with the children at home, and when they remain with children at home they have nothing to eat. They have nothing to give the children. In most cases, we saw that girls were mostly affected because they had to drop out of school and had early pregnancies … That’s when we sat down and decided on income generating activities because we saw that most of the women in their homes are vulnerable and poor. The women decided on the activities that they can get some small money inside their pockets to assist the girls and also food security.”
Olivia Scott Kamkwamba
Executive Director of the Moving Windmills Project in Malawi. Dr. Kamkwamba works with her husband, William, who founded the organization in his hometown of Kasungu. Recognizing the strict social hierarchies in the region, Olivia recognized the need to empower women and girls, who were small holder farmers, through education. While William’s original idea was to build a machine shop, they expanded the mission to build a resource center, searching across genders, to provide water, solar electricity, computers, and motorcycles:
“It is a challenge with elders because we are combatting generational fear. There are also legacies of colonialist systems that do not work for the communities where there is tension in how people want to access the economy and what they believe organizations can do for them. Inside a space where innovation is, you want to cultivate change and progress. At times, ideals around change and innovation can feel combative or at odds with the prevailing norms… give non-traditional candidates a chance. Find people who may not know how to give voice to the actions they make intuitively. For example, when I think of water conservation, I learn much more about what can be done with so little water when I observe than I stand to learn when I interrogate.”
Gemma May-Kimani
Global Programme Manager of the Moving Windmills Project in Malawi. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Gemma’s career path included working for large foundations, which she found to be stifling because of the disconnect between funders’ expectations and local community needs. In meeting Dr. Olivia Kamkwamba, she connected with the Moving Windmills mission of sparking ideas and innovation. It began with William’s story, which became a film about how he built a windmill to bring electricity to farms that increasingly suffered from floods and droughts because of global warming. (The film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and began streaming on Netflix in 2019 as “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.”):
“Nobody wants to do fundraising: They’re all afraid of it. I learned that because I did a lot of work with girls’ empowerment programs in schools and with refugee programs. When I worked in Tanzania, I had a great female boss. I’d never had a female boss at that level before. I’d never seen a woman at that level of leadership. She would spend a lot of time helping me with fundraising strategies and putting me at the forefront of lots of meetings … and helping me pinpoint where my strong and weak areas are. I had never had that before. In [Moving Windmills], we have an apprenticeship program to mentor women and assist them with finding the agency to speak up. We also help them make decisions based on their own thoughts and experiences…culturally, men are usually the decision-makers and women are hesitant to speak up in the presence of men. We are trying to work on women mentoring.”
Jo Ashbridge
Founder and Executive Director of AzuKo, (which means “all of humanity” in Bengali). After working for several years in Asia and Africa with Engineers without Borders, Jo formed AzuKo to address the needs of communities in rural Rangpur, in northern Bangladesh. As of this writing AzuKo has partnered with a local organization Neropod Bangladesh Songster for a dozen years, where housing conditions are very poor. The organization involves women in understanding design and construction principles so that the next time there is a storm or a flash flood they can maintain it. AzuKo also has gained the trust of the community by offering safety training during severe weather events.
“In those early days, we would go to communities and say: “We have these programs. Is this something you’d be interested in?” And there was a little bit of confusion. I wouldn’t say challenge, but like, why? Just lots of asking, why? Why would we do this? But I think if you involve everyone in the conversation, it’s kind of a no brainer. We don’t seem to have any challenges, and one of the reasons we often work only with women in many of our classes is because it is still difficult, culturally, for some women to raise their hand and ask questions if it’s a mixed group. We create a bit of a safe space. And women feel that they can fully engage in both the theoretical and hands-on training of it.”
Apu Chandra Roy
Following in his father’s footsteps, Apu works with Nirapod Bangladesh Songstha to support vulnerable families especially in housing, climate response, and community development. In addition, he is a program manager for Jo Ashbridge’s NGO, AzuKo, which teaches women how to build climate resistant housing.
“In addition to the slums, we also work in rural areas where we’ve formed more than 30 community groups. Each group usually includes 15 to 30 members, mostly women. These village groups take the lead in identifying their local issue whether it’s related to housing, sanitation, water, or agriculture and they work together to solve them. When they need broader support, they can connect with other nearby groups through our network… And, most importantly, I have been inspired by the community itself, especially the women I work with. When I go to them, they share their struggles, and together we look for solutions.”
Iracema Waleska Crowe
Former Deputy Director, Guatemala Program for Engineers without Borders, Iracema Waleska has completed a term as a Teaching Fellow at the National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership at Harvard University. She has worked with several initiatives in Guatemala on clean water and sanitation programs – to improve rural women’s health in the climate crisis. She is focused on re-centering advocacy efforts that involve the indigenous Mayan way of conceiving the world:
“Earth is our mother; she is to be approached as a living entity, not an object. It’s not that we humans are superior and can see earth as a simple resource. In fact, we depend on her and we are part of her, and Earth can feel the pain; and Earth can express when she’s not doing okay — by storming, by not storming. I believe there is hope if humanity opens spaces to indigenous peoples’ perspectives from around the world. On one side we have science and that’s going to be always so important. We need scientists. On the other hand, I think indigenous people should be allowed to be part of coming up with solutions. Indigenous people, who have kept their practices, have experience in how to live a different type of life than what we are used to.”
Colectiva Tramando
As climate change accelerates desertification in Chile’s central regions, the
collective is now turning its focus toward environmental injustices. In her essay Solastalgia (Ecological Grief), ecologist and collective member Belén Gallardo writes:
“For poor women, the future is now. Only for the privileged, climate
change is in the future. For all other communities, it is now—because
now we are living with extreme climate consequences.”
Six interviews have been conducted for this oral history, photos and other tapestries can be viewed in the link below.
