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Women of Africa, you have everything to lose, unite now to demand action on climate change!

Saturday November 07 2015
byanyima

Winnie Byanyima is the executive director of Oxfam International. ILLUSTRATION | JOHN NYAGAH |

Whenever I open the newspaper, visit Oxfam partners or talk to small-scale farmers I see the impacts of climate change in Africa – increased droughts, heavier rains, unpredictable weather, repeated across the continent.

The fossil fuel emissions causing these climate effects are playing havoc with farming and are destroying crops across the continent.

Left unchecked, climate change could lead to an extra 50 million hungry people by 2050. Climate change is pushing food prices up and food availability down.

This is a threat to us all and the future of our continent — but it is not an equal threat. Cruelly, the impacts of climate change will be first felt by the poorest. Poor people across our continent are being hit first and hardest as their livelihoods and crops are ruined, leaving millions hungry. More than 70 per cent of food production across Africa is reliant on rain.

It is mostly women who are on this frontline. Across Africa 60 per cent of women in work, rely on agriculture for their livelihood. They are often paid less than men for the same work and lack rights to land and equal access to technology and marketing networks.

Consequently, women food producers in poor communities are being hit the hardest by climate change. This is despite the fact that they themselves and the African countries they live in are the least responsible for climate change.

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It would take the average Ethiopian 180 years to register the same carbon emissions as the average American is responsible for in one year. This is inequality on a grand scale.

African people are resilient. Who else has overcome four centuries of the slave trade and one century of colonialism to build a continent that is growing, on average, at 5 per cent a year? But this resilience seen in Africa’s people will not be a match for our changing climate unless political leaders unite in Paris in December to help them. African leaders have a job to do — they have to unite to protect the people of this continent.

On November 14, African citizens will march together in Nairobi to call for this. This will be the first march of many taking place around the world and I am proud to see that Africa is leading the way. There is no time to waste. We need thousands of people to gather and demand action from their elected leaders.

Together, we’ll be sending the message that now is the time for visionary leadership that acknowledges the rising financial cost and risk of inaction.

A climate deal this December that delivers for Africa could change all of this. We need our leaders to come back home with an agreement that helps raise the billions needed to cope with the effects of climate change. Communities across Africa are already trying to adapt, but the scale of climate impacts is simply too big to manage.

We Africans are already stepping up the mark with visionary plans to develop economies powered by clean energy. But there too, we need billions to finance the transition.

Oxfam has joined with the Pan Africa Climate Justice Alliance and We Have Faith alliances on an African People’s Petition to show our leaders how much Africans care about this cause. We aim to have one million signatures, and the signs are that we are getting there!

We need our leaders to take this mandate forward and be united to call for a fair and ambitious agreement. Will Africans stand on the sidelines hoping for a handout or will they stand up and shout “Enough!”?

Climate change is here, and the costs are mounting with every delay. It’s time to march in Nairobi and around the world for climate justice. With hundreds of thousands of others, we demand an agreement that guarantees the survival of humanity and of our food.

Winnie Byanyima is the executive director of Oxfam International

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