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By Paul Williams
The week-long African Women’s Climate Assembly has ended in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with a call for an end to gas flare and other extractive industry activities that impact negatively on the climate.
For four days, October 17 to 20, 2022, over 150 women activists from 14 countries in West and Central Africa met in Port Harcourt, under the aegis of the Women’s Climate Assembly, with the theme: ‘African Women Unite on the Frontlines of Climate Crisis.’
Organized by WoMIN African Alliance, in collaboration with Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Centre, the event provided a platform for community women leaders and activists from Guinea Conakry, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Niger and host Nigeria to come together and share their experiences on the impact of the climate crisis.
According to a release from Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Centre’s Fabian Nsemeke, the event also “represents the commencement of a permanent assembly of African women for climate and development justice.
“Participating women activists are impacted by destructive extractive activities such as mining, oil and gas extraction; industrial agriculture, fishing and forestry; and mega energy and infrastructure projects.
“These are the women who shoulder the worsening impacts of climate disasters in their daily lives despite having contributed nothing at all to the growing climate crisis.”
The four-day event, according to the organizers, further provided “a critical space to centre African women’s voices and enabled women to share their experiences; build new critical knowledge to inform strategies of resistance; learn from each other; imagine a different community, society, and Africa; and deepen pan African solidarity.
“Participants asserted their rights to free, prior and informed consent as well as their right to say ‘No’ to destructive development agendas that harm communities and rob them of their lands and livelihoods in the name of profit for a few.
“The assembly presented a timely opportunity for women to discuss real solutions and development alternatives to the neoliberal economic model that continues to destroy our natural resources and extract benefits for countries in the global North at the cost of countless African lives.”
The Nigerian delegation to the Assembly, in their contribution to the communiqué arrived at the end of the meeting, called for an end to gas flaring in the African country, adding “We don’t want the gas burning any more. Let us have our lives today because we don’t know what will happen to our next generation and their times will be even worse than this.”
The recent floods in Nigeria have left large swathes of agricultural land under water,
reportedly displaced over a million people, with over 3,000 dead and three core Niger Delta states – Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta – bearing the brunt.
Describing this as “a stark reminder to participants and the world to act with urgency to address the roots of the climate crisis,” WoMin and Kebetkache noted that “though Africa has contributed less than 3% of all carbon emissions since 1880 and is warming faster than any other region in the world, it has contributed least to the climate crisis.
By 2050, as many as 86 million Africans will be forced to migrate within their own countries due to climate change.”
The delegation from Senegal to the African women climate assembly demanded that African governments participating in COP27 “take into consideration where the
oil and other resource exploration will happen because our communities should
not suffer for this. Communities’ rights matter! Give to communities what belongs
to them. Women must be involved in negotiations wherever there are decisions to
be made about oil and resources. We women are responsible for life. We handle
households, livelihoods, and everything essential for daily survival and so we must be present in negotiations too.”
WoMin and Kebetkache, through the release, stressed that the “deepening of extensive movements of African women in countries, and at a pan-African level, resisting extractive activities, demanding sovereign debt cancellation, organizing for the climate debt to be settled by historically responsible countries and polluters, and deepening living alternatives offers Africa, its governments and citizens, is the road to a just and equitable future,” and translates to climate justice for all.
