Understanding the 'Right to Say NO'

The world’s elites amass wealth through a destructive economic system that has led to an unfolding ecological and climate crisis. The extractives sector – which includes mining, oil and gas extraction, dirty energy, industrial agriculture, and mega infrastructure projects – lies at the very heart of this violent economic system. A system that allows corporates and the global elites to profit through the exploitation of peasant and working-class labour and the plunder of natural resources that sustain the planet and its people.

In all this, women carry the heaviest burden because of their gender assigned roles to supply reproductive goods and take care of ‘the family’. It is women who must walk further in search of clean drinking water and safer energy and put food on the table under increasingly difficult circumstances. Land grabs and forced dislocations linked to extractivist projects and the climate crisis are fuelling already high levels of violence against women across the continent.

Across the continent, women and their communities resist these imposed ideas of “development” and organise powerfully to claim their Right to Say NO. From exposing the costs and impacts of destructive "development" projects and challenging governments and corporations to blockading roads and railway lines and building solidarities between communities across the continent – women are in the vanguard of struggles for justice.