girls’ education can help in the fight against climate change. Because of CAMFED, Zakeyu was able to finish high school and college, study abroad in Costa Rica and learn Spanish, and is living on her own at the age of 24 with no intentions of getting married any time soon. In her home country Malawi, the average woman is 19 when they first give birth, and on average goes on to have four children.

Organisations such as Drawdown and the Brookings Institution claim that high-quality, universal education for all genders is essential to tackle the climate crisis. One reason is that when girls are allowed to stay in school, then they end to wait longer before getting married. Education provides girls with more economic power, which in turn gives them more agency to access healthcare services such as birth control. The Covid pandemic unfortunately has been a major setback for girls' education. UNICEF estimates that as a result, up to 10 million more girls are at risk of becoming child brides over the next decade.

These organisations make it very clear that the world’s wealthy countries are far more responsible for carbon emissions and that reproductive policies have no place in the climate agenda. However, the nonprofit Drawdown is focused on finding solutions to the climate crisis and claims that voluntary family planning programmes combined with high-quality education could help to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 68.90 gigatons between 2020 and 2050.

Education is also an important tool to help women and their families survive climate disasters, as they continue to become more severe and more frequent. For example, in a country such as Bangladesh girls aren’t traditionally taught how to swim, but through expanding access to swimming the country “had really managed to turn the dial on how many women die in the floods.” A disproportionate number of girls and women are affected by disasters such as floods and droughts.

Girls’ education can help build climate resilience in many different forms, such as learning to follow weather reports and choosing more durable construction techniques for their homes. Or working to make farming more resilient and more productive, like Zakeyu is doing, despite changing weather.

Image from Brookings Institution