Climate Justice clubs: Empowering adolescent girls to lead and promote equitable and sustainable solutions for their communities, and the planet

• In Event: Girls and Women Leading the Way: How Clubs Empower Changemakers

Proposal

Climate change is one of the most significant global challenges of this century. Though its impacts vary among regions and populations, people who are vulnerable and marginalized will experience the greatest impacts due to societal barriers that create challenges to accessing resources, information, and even their ability to relocate. Moreover, climate change is not gender-neutral; women and girls are more vulnerable than men and boys (Habtezion, 2016). Continuous gender discrimination and damaging gender norms put women and girls in harmful situations by disrupting their education, increasing their risk of early and forced marriage, and minimizing their agency and decision-making abilities. Various strategies have been proposed to address climate change, yet one of the most powerful mechanisms for addressing the impacts of climate change is largely dismissed. Girls’ education has proven to be an impactful strategy for positive outcomes and sustainable development—including climate change (Kwauk, 2022). This can be explained by understanding how education and life skills can help girls make better choices for themselves and with their families, and communities, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation of climate change and through activism for change in policies and practices. This presentation offers a synopsis of Room to Read’s gender-transformative life skills program that addresses the intersection of gender and climate inequality by expanding its girls’ life skills education programming to encompass climate justice clubs. The two-year pilot will begin in 2023. The curriculum will be conducted for adolescent girls in grades 7 and 8 in the district of Banke, Nepal. The Climate Justice Clubs consist of 25 clubs, with 620 adolescent girls attending 26 sessions (13 sessions each year) in two academic years (2023/24 and 2024/25). The curriculum was developed based on Room to Read’s life skills framework, prioritizing five key life skills-- collaboration, leadership, resilience, critical thinking, and decision-making-- necessary for adolescent youth to succeed in school and beyond. The curriculum content focuses on developing these life skills and increasing participants’ knowledge and skills regarding gender, climate change, and climate justice. This presentation will cover the program design, the results from the midline evaluation and explore the learnings from the first year of implementing the pilot.

Author

• Heather M Simpson, Room to Read