Women on the Frontlines of Africa’s Climate Crisis

Africa is living the climate crisis in which peasant and working-class women confront grave impacts. Living off the land and taking care of their communities, they lose the most when floods, droughts, and other climate-related disasters strike. They are the primary victims of dirty energy projects such as oil, coal, gas, and big dams that steal their land, rivers and forests and pollute their bodies. Dirty energy, in the form of fossil fuels, is a major contributor to climate change. Affected women rarely enjoy any of the benefits that come from the energy produced by these projects, with Africa hosting most of the world’s energy poor.

Africa has the enviable opportunity to choose clean energy in the form of wind, solar and mini hydro. However, the predominant approach to renewables is large-scale, corporate-led, and profit-centred resulting in many of the same problems that characterize dirty energy. If we are to meet the conservative Paris commitment of 1.5 degrees of global warming, from which the world sits just over 5 degrees of, then women’s movements hand in hand with other allied movements must rise further to demand a future for humanity and all living beings on our planet.

Women Building Power (WBP) supports community, and specifically, women’s resistance to mega energy projects, with a specific focus to fossil fuels and large hydro dams. We stand with women and their communities contesting the Sendou coal station in Senegal, Grand Inga dam in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, coal extraction and coal fired power in six sites across South Africa, and the Save Lamu campaign in Kenya to name a few.

In this work we support women and their communities and propose just energy solutions within a wider concept of alternatives to the dominant development paradigm. We focus our efforts on supporting and building women’s movements in the renewable energy sector, and we are making a significant investment in building an African convergence of organisations and movements which share a climate justice agenda.