Quarterly Newsflash: Ambassador climate action projects across the continent, the first-ever Cape Town Climate Concert, and launching the ACA Podcast
A 2024 second-quarter newsflash from the ACA team
The second quarter of 2024 followed suit from the first with many milestones and a fully packed calendar of events, workshops, and new projects. As we prepare for the second half of 2024, here’s a brief look at what we have been up to in April, May, and June:
Celebrating our Ambassador climate action projects across Africa
Our aim for the year-long Ambassador programme has always been to create more opportunities for young people to lead the change they want to see in the world. This group of Ambassadors certainly lived up to this vision.
Near the end of the programme, each ambassador implemented a project in their community that drew on the knowledge they had learnt throughout the year. The projects ranged from a documentary and investigative journalism article, to school environmental literacy and awareness campaigns, training farmers to use sustainable farming practices, and innovating food solutions through pre-cooked solar-dehydrated beans.
To officially mark the end of the 2023/2024 Ambassador cohort, and celebrate the incredible projects they implemented in their communities, we held an online ceremony to thank them and wish them well on their journeys ahead. This cohort was made up of 29 young climate activists from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia, Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, Malawi, Uganda, Namibia, South Sudan, and Zambia. We know this is just the beginning for them.
In June, with the last cohort having graduated, it was time to welcome a new cohort into the programme. Over 300 people applied and we had the difficult task of narrowing down so many strong applications to just 30 passionate young people with a curiosity about how to act and advocate for justice. We look forward to seeing how they grow as activists in the year ahead.
Sounds and solidarity at the Cape Town Climate Concert
To kick off Youth Month, we held the first-ever Cape Town Climate Concert on Saturday, 1 June, with a crowd of 150 people. The concert wasn’t just about music, it was a rallying cry for a better future building on the long South African history of the connection between song and social change.
The event opened with a panel discussion about how art can be used as a form of activism, featuring Dela Gwala, Mosibudi Molokomme, and Talia Ramkilawan. Then we moved into a formidable lineup of local artists with powerful messages, including the soulful Kujenga, the anarchist hip-hop of Soundz of the South, the uplifting tunes of Soulitude and Friends, and the dynamic duo, Nikita and Ethan Adams, aka ethnik.
In addition to musical performances, attendees had the opportunity to engage with organizations actively involved in environmental and social justice initiatives through informational booths. These organisations included African Climate Alliance, Project 90 by 2030, and Youth Capital.
Building shared messages with Africa’s Youth Voices
May also saw the launch of our third annual Africa’s Youth Voices Online Conference Series. This conference series is intended to foster collaboration, build solidarity, and develop joint messages from youth living in Africa.
We gather for five sessions, ahead of COP29, to further alliances, strengthen existing messages, create new ones, and through advocacy and action take control of the climate justice narrative with Africa’s realities at the centre.
After the first re-orienting session, we hosted the second session in June. During this session, we discussed the question: What does our just future look like? We also unpacked what climate action means across the continent.
Strategising with the Cancel Coal Coalition
As part of our ongoing campaigning around the Cancel Coal court case, we met with the Cancel Coal coalition — including Vukani Environmental Movement, groundWork, Life After Coal, Centre for Environmental Rights, and the Cancel Coal Youth Task Force — to plan for the months ahead as we approach a potential court date for the case.
Strengthening solidarity and co-creating strategy with our Youth Activist Gatherings
Our bi-monthly online Activist Gatherings are a safe space for young activists, from across the continent, to connect, reflect, and build solidarity. These online gatherings are open to all members of the ACA Youth Activist Network, as well as those wanting to join our network.
After the success of the March for System Change, and several decentralised actions across the continent, in March, our April Gathering was a space to discuss the importance of collaboration, the need for a decentralised approach, and plans for taking action during the rest of the year.
Our May Gathering focussed on strategising the way forward. Since co-creation is a strong value at ACA, our next Activist Gathering helped shape our ACA Youth Network Strategy. As we build a strong grassroots climate justice movement, our strategy must be guided by the people who are most affected by the climate crisis and those wanting to contribute to a just future.
An engaged group of young people joined us for this strategic networking session that unpacked aspirational plans from youth across the African continent as it relates to climate justice and how civil society organisations can support the movements they serve.
Engaging schools and movement-building
We ran an assembly and workshops at St. Cyprians and Hershel — two schools in Cape Town — on climate literacy and action while incorporating elements from our ACA Activist Guide. This is part of our ongoing school outreach programme to mobilise students from across Cape Town to get involved in climate action.
Launching the African Climate Alliance Podcast
The ACA Podcast has been a long time in the making. We see it as an extension of our educational and storytelling work. A platform to answer the questions: What does climate justice look like in Africa? And what will it take to achieve it?
Each episode offers insightful discussions, inspiring stories, and practical solutions to address the climate crisis with advocates, activists, and experts from across the continent.
So far, we have published a full first season, and started releasing a second season. The five-episode-long first season dives into a few topics that we believe are key to understanding what it means to take intersectional climate action. The conversations that form season one are replays of past ACA Dialogues from over the years.
The first season included an elections-focussed bonus episode. Ahead of the South African national elections, in May, we released a collaborative episode exploring the importance of voting as one way to take a stand for justice and change. This bonus episode unpacked the manifestos of a few prominent political parties in South Africa – with a focus on climate change, energy justice, and plans for a just South Africa.
The second season focuses on our Cancel Coal campaign and is hosted by two members of our Cancel Coal Youth Task Force. It comprises five episodes that explore the multifaceted impacts of coal mining and the way forward for our energy future.
From frontline advocates in coal-affected communities, and legal experts discussing the environmental crisis, to the transformative power of spiritual leaders, each episode delves into diverse experiences and perspectives, encouraging us to engage with the urgent need to Cancel Coal for a just and sustainable future.
Listen to it here.
Strengthening our mobile journalism skills with Seen TV
Part of our mission, this year, is to offer more skills-building opportunities to young activists in our network so that they can learn to tell their own stories as a tool for advocacy. With this in mind, we collaborated with the globally renowned mobile journalism platform, Seen TV, to hold a mobile journalism skills-building workshop.
The workshop taught us about how to use digital tools and our lived experiences to tell good stories about the climate crisis, and how to build our own social media filters to make our stories even more engaging.
The purpose of the workshop was to learn how to tell powerful digital stories that share our visions for the future, in the leadup to the launch of our #TheFutureIs digital campaign.
As we live through a time of many overlapping global crises and calls for justice, imagining a more just, collective future is more important now than ever. To dismantle systems of oppression, we need to imagine our alternatives.
This is why we asked young people, from across Africa, to share what #TheFutureIs to share on social media and create a shared vision. While we understand the limits of digital activism, we wanted to use this campaign to complement the rest of our programmatic work and create clear connections between overlapping systems of oppression as we call for intersectional justice.
Publishing our 2023-2024 Annual Report
During the past financial year, there have been many impactful highlights across our four key programmes — education, advocacy, action, and ambassadors. Our 2023-2024 annual report includes an overview of our programmatic work, how we work, a financial overview, and a look at our board and team.
Unpacking Afrocentrism and Indigenous Knowledge
Afrocentrism and centring Indigenous knowledge are central to the work that we do. So, for our May online educational workshops, we focussed on deepening our understanding of the power of Afrocentric and Indigenous knowledge by better unpacking the systems of knowledge and information sharing that African people have used in the past and present.
We also looked at how Africans have gone about conserving the environment and living as one with it through knowledge passed from generation to generation.
This was followed by an ACA Dialogue panel discussion where we spoke to Sanele KaNtshingana, Yvette Abrahams, and Bernedette Muthien, who have all been part of building capacity and community awareness of Indigenous knowledge through storytelling and their activism in their different communities.
Publishing the first ACA Writing Circle op-ed
After launching our ACA Writing Circle in February, we finally published our first collaborative open letter on World Environment Day. This followed months of brainstorming and drafting meetings to make sure that the final piece was a true reflection of all those involved.
On World Environment Day, we reflected on our planet’s precious resources, and the need for land restoration, desertification, and drought resilience. This is a particularly critical issue currently gripping the African continent. Africa is a beautiful continent that is vast and diverse with many contexts that differ. However, drought, lack of access to clean water, and land degradation permeate across borders, affecting nations across the region.
With this in mind, seven young people from the African Climate Alliance network, from several different African countries, came together to pen this open letter with African governments in mind.
Launching the Activist Guide website
It’s been just over a year since we launched the ACA Activist Guide. We decided it was time that that guide had a digital home. So, we built one. The Activist Guide website acts as a place for people to learn more about why we created the guide, who contributed to it, download a digital copy, and access poster versions of each chapter in 5 languages (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Swahili, and African French) that can be used as educational resources.
Navigating Changing Systems in a Changing Climate
The climate has been changing, but human activity has accelerated that change rapidly. In June, we interrogated the human activity that has accelerated climate change, and how the responsibility for the crisis, adapting to it, and slowing it down must be equitably shared with those contributing the most.
In doing so, we deepened our understanding of the systematic roots of the climate crisis. It is through understanding the journey of how we got to where we are with our environment and looking at the systems that have caused and greatly contributed to the climate crisis that we can position ourselves as the continent of Africa and its young people.
This was followed by an ACA Dialogue panel discussion, with Joe Kobuthi and Abednego Chanda, to discuss strategies for transforming systems that created and continue to worsen the climate crisis.
Here’s to the second half of the year!
