Polish Mothers in Krakow. Polish artist Cecilya Malik began a campaign against the removal of the obligation for private landowners to apply for permission to cut down trees. Credit: Tomasz Wiech

By Daan Bauwens
GHENT, Belguim, Dec 6 2018 (IPS)

Unjustified extra charges on drinking water, exploitation of labourers in the countryside and uncontrolled property speculation. In Europe’s periphery, citizens’ initiatives show how all too prevalent modern-day ailments can be tackled successfully. More often than not with the help of artists.

Spring 2014.

Pressured by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, the government of an Ireland suffering from imposed austerity measures decides to introduce an additional levy on drinking water. Spontaneous protest ensue. A single woman, waking up in the middle of the night when workers are installing a water meter outside her house, comes out and blocks their way whilst still her night gown. She manages to get them to leave without finishing the job.

The meter fairy

Thousands follow her example in the following weeks. Some are arrested and convicted. In the southern coastal town of Cobh, citizens set up guard posts on bridges and boats to inform other citizens when the water company is arriving and where exactly it’s heading. Soon the protest receives the support of the trade unions and political parties, leading up to a demonstration march of 120,000 people in October of the same year. Mass demonstrations are subsequently held all through the country, often ending in concerts by popular Irish artists.

The largest protest campaign the country had ever seen forced the government to reduce the proposed water tax by 75 percent. The water tax is currently still on the table, but the Irish now have got the “meter fairy”. Residents of a house where a new water meter has just been installed can text their address to a certain number. The same night craftsmen will come over and remove the meter.

Property speculation

“Let me conclude with a warning,” says Brendan Ogle, one of the leading activists in the protests, “while we are progressing in some ways, we are at the same time slipping back to the darkest of ages.” Ogle refers to the housing emergency in his hometown Dublin, where rents have risen so sharply that this year the city has become most expensive place to live in the Eurozone, leaping ahead of both Paris and London.

“We squatted in an empty building and started a community centre for homeless people where they could stay and sleep,” says Ogle. “The court finally ordered we leave building, stating that while the homeless emergency is important, it is not more important than the right to property. Last Thursday, the 24th person that we housed in the building died on the streets. This in only 16 months.”

It seems to be a trend in cities all over Europe: a housing market under pressure causes speculation, leading to growing numbers of homeless people. The state doesn’t act and the law is not on the side of those who want to solve the problem.

Summit for activists

The same happened to Maria Sanchez of Cerro Liberdad, an citizen’s initiative which occupied an empty Andalusian farm owned by a bank. Sanchez put local labourers to work in decent conditions in a region that suffers from poverty and exploitation, and in March of this year she was arrested. All traces that her movement had left in the farm were erased.

“I did what the government fails to do,” she says, “I told that to the judge. This was not a crime.”

Ogle and Sanchez were just two of the 90 activists from all over Europe present at the summit “The Art of Organising Hope” that was held in early November in the Belgian town of Ghent. At the summit they showed each other how exactly they realised their plans to fight injustice, with the emphasis on the practical side of things.

The summit was the culmination of a research all across Europe that a fellowship of volunteers, journalists, artists and activists undertook in 2016 and 2017. Thoroughly documenting 60 grassroots and civil society organisations, they looked for hopeful discourses, methods and practices to counter the present-day upsurge of Euroscepticism and indifference.

Radical imagination

In the final selection of activists to be present at the summit, the majority turned out to be from Europe’s periphery with an especially large representation from the Balkans. That was no coincidence according to initiator and organiser Dominique Willaert, artistic leader of the Ghent-based social-artistic movement Victoria Deluxe.

“Activism and imagination at Europe’s external borders is much more radical than in Western Europe,” he says, “we brought them here especially to fertilise us with their imagination. During our trips around Europe we noticed that people in the periphery don’t feel as though they belong to Europe. That is most noticeable in countries that have fallen victim to European austerity measures.”

“The difference between them and us is striking,” he continues, “in Western Europe we strive for consensus and negotiation with the government, many organisations depend on the government for funding, so they become policy implementers. The activism and imagination of the external borders is much more radical.”

According to Willaert, it is exactly that imagination and radicalism that Western Europe needs. “We must give citizens the feeling that they have power and can create movements that bring change. Powerlessness can mean the end of Europe.”

Polish mothers on tree stumps

In the citizen’s projects at the summit it was moreover apparent that a large number was led by artists. “In order to develop deep democracy, new methods and symbols are needed,” Dominique Willaert explains his team’s choice, “we must go beyond the idea of parliaments and elected representatives. There is a need for new stories and images that can fertilise communities and mobilise people. That requires the help of artists.”

And social media seem to be quite an effective to tool in bringing that about, it seems. At the main stage, Polish Anna Alboth and Belgian Leen Van Waes told the story of how their Facebook solidarity campaign for for Syrian civilians led to a march that mobilised more than 4000 participants from 62 countries. The Civil March For Aleppo lasted eight and a half months, passing through Europe on foot from Berlin to Syria, an action that got the organising team nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The most mobilising image came from the Polish artist Cecilya Malik. In the beginning of January a controversial new law removed the obligation for private landowners to apply for permission to cut down trees, pay compensation or plant new trees, or even inform the authorities of the plans to cut down trees. Up until now, more than one million trees have been reported cut down with newly cleared spaces in cities, towns and countryside as a consequence.

“I knew I had to do something,” Malik says, “but I had a six-month-old baby. So I came up with the plan to sit on one of the stumps every day, let someone take a picture of me while I was breastfeeding and share that image on social media.” The Polish government did not reverse the law despite the hundreds of mothers following Malik’s example. But the media attention on breastfeeding mothers on tree stumps did lead to a surge in environmental consciousness with the general public. This way, a new draft law excluding the vast majority of NGOs from the consultation process on environmental projects, was shelved for the time being.

Haitians concerned about the impacts of unchecked mining meet at a sweltering tin-roofed church near Grand Bois on Jul. 5, 2013. Source: HGW/Lafontaine Orvild

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Aug 1 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

As the government works on preparing “an attractive law that will entice investors”, Haitian popular organisations are mobilising and forming networks to resist mining in their country.

Already one-third of the north of Haiti is under research, exploration, or exploitation license to foreign companies."We in Baie de Henne are against any eventual mining because we will not profit one bit. It will have harmful impacts that destroy our fertile lands and our fruit trees and dry up our aquifers.” -- Vernicia Phillus, a member of the Tèt Kole women’s group

Some 2,400 square kilometres have been parceled out to Haitian firms fronting for U.S. and Canadian concerns. Some estimate that Haiti’s mineral wealth – mostly gold, copper, and silver – could be worth as much as 20 billion dollars. The awarding of permits behind closed doors, with no independent or community oversight, has angered many in Haiti, who fear that the government is opening the country up to systematic pillage.

But the head of the government mining agency told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) his concern is to assure that Haiti is made more “attractive” to potential investors.

“We need an attractive mining law,” said Ludner Remarais, head of the Mining and Energy Agency. “A mining law that will entice investors.”

The current law is obsolete, according to Remarais.

Haiti’s “gold rush” has been going on for the past five years or so, since the price of gold and other minerals rose. Until last year, the government and the companies cut their deals behind closed doors. After an investigation revealed that 15 percent of the county was under contract, on Feb. 20, 2013 the Haitian Senate adopted a resolution demanding all activities cease in order to allow for a national debate and for analysis of all contracts.

“We are scrupulously respecting the decision,” Remarais said, but he added that the resolution does not annul the rights already acquired.

Local resistance in the gold-rich regions

Peasant, human rights, food sovereignty and environmental organisations are worried about the disastrous effects the mining industry could have on water quality, farmland, and on the affected regions in general and have formed the national Collective Against Mining to assist local associations with information and consciousness-raising sessions.

On Jul. 5, over 200 farmers from the area around the Grand Bois deposit – about 11 kilometres south of Limbé, in the North department – got together to discuss the mining operation and their futures. They spoke of their worries for three hours in sweltering tin-roofed church.

“When someone talks about mining, our history makes us think of slavery, of the takeover of our farmlands,” said Willy Pierre, a social sciences teacher from a nearby school. “We could lose our fertile fields. We will be forced off our land. Where will we live?”

The Grand Bois deposit is rich in gold and copper, according to tests carried out by the Canadian mining company Eurasian Minerals. Eurasian owns the license given by the BME to its Haitian subsidiary, Société Minière Citadelle S.A.

During the meeting, many people said they were nervous.

“This mining business should be a lesson for all of us,” warned Jean Vilmé, a farmer from the Bogé region of Grand Bois. “Not only will those of us who live around the mineral deposit perish, the entire country will be swallowed up!”

Two weeks earlier about 50 members of local and national organisations met in Jean Rabel, an impoverished town in the Northwest department with poor roads and no water system or health facilities. Participants watched and debated a video on mining in Haiti and discussed their next steps.

Earlier that month, some 60 representatives of the associations in the collective organised a day-long meeting at Montrouis, northeast of the capital. Of particular concern are the protection of ground water, food sovereignty, agricultural land, biodiversity, health, and land ownership.

Clébért Duval, a member of the peasant association Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (“Small Haitian Peasants Working Together”) from Port-de-Paix, noted that a state that is working in favour of its people could use mineral resources to “change the conditions of the popular masses, peasants, vulnerable people, and could give this country a new face”.

However, he said, “If the state is a predator that is working for the multinationals, for the capitalist system which, since it is in crisis, is taking over the riches of poor countries to fight the crisis, then that state will always encourage mining. All the money that should go to the people will go to the foreign firms, except for a few crumbs for the local guys who are serving as go-betweens. The mining companies will get all the riches, just as they have in the past.”

Many rejected the officials’ arguments that mining is important for the country’s development and economy.

“In 2012, some companies did prospecting,” said Vernicia Phillus, a member of the Tèt Kole women’s coordination in Baie de Henne. “They took away soil and rock samples. Each person who worked for them got between 200 and 250 gourdes (4.65 to 5.81 dollars) a day.

“We in Baie de Henne are against any eventual mining because we will not profit one bit. It will have harmful impacts that destroy our fertile lands and our fruit trees and dry up our aquifers.”

Government and World Bank also organising

In early June, the Haitian mining agency and the World Bank organised a “Mining Forum” aimed at developing “the mining sector in a way that makes it a motor for the country’s economic takeoff.” Most of the speakers were from foreign institutions and from mining companies.

Parliamentarians, local elected officials, independent geologists and researchers, representatives of the people from the regions concerned, and grassroots organisations did not address the room.

One of the meeting’s principle objectives was allegedly to sketch out the general contours of a new mining law for the country, even though World Bank officials said they had kicked off that process earlier this year, according to media reports.

During the Jun. 3-4 forum, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said that his government was working with “competent experts who have [Haiti’s] national interests at heart”, according to the Associated Press.

But World Bank involvement with the law appears to be a conflict of interest. In 2010, the International Finance Commission (IFC), a branch of the bank, invested about five million in Eurasian Mineral’s Haiti operations, receiving Eurasian shares in exchange.

The World Bank is often criticised by organisations like Mining Watch Canada, Earthworks, and others for being lax where the protection of poor countries is concerned, and for its role in the “continuation of colonialism” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America through its important loans to mining companies.

In March, the U.S. government representative to the World Bank abstained in a vote to approve a bank loan for 12 billion dollars to a mining operation in the Gobi Desert, citing concerns over potential negative environmental impacts. The bank loans were approved anyway, according to Inter Press Service.

Asked about an eventual new law that would be “attractive” and capable of “enticing investors”, the director of DOP, a member of the Collective Against Mining, said he was concerned.

“Mining legislation that is ‘attractive’ will open the country up for ‘business,’” wrote attorney Patrice Florvilus on Jul. 14, 2013, making reference to the government’s slogan “Haiti – Open for business.”

“Business, without considering the deleterious effects on community life and on the environment, which is already deteriorating at a worrying pace,” he added.

In a Jul. 22 note, the Collective wrote the following: “We want a truly national law and international conventions that protect life, water, land, and the environment, and that outlaw mining which brings with it pollution, destruction, contamination, and more hunger.”

Please also see other Haiti Grassroots Watch stories on the issue: Dossier #18 and Dossier #27

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

One of the boats built with the PRODEP money. Credit: HGW/Jude Stanley Roy

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 11 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

A 61-million-dollar, eight-year community development project funded by the World Bank and executed by the Haitian government and two international development agencies has raised questions of waste and corruption, and even carried out what could be called “social and political re-engineering”.

The Project for Participatory Community Development (Projet de développement communautaire participatif or PRODEP – See Sidebar: What is PRODEP?) enabled the construction of roads and schoolrooms, and the funding of agricultural and other projects.

But a lengthy investigation by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) found that PRODEP and its millions of dollars appear to have done real harm to Haiti’s fragile democracy and have likely contributed to the country’s growing status as a so-called “NGO Republic”. These findings are largely corroborated by a new study of hundreds of similar “community driven development” or CDD projects by two economists working for the very institution which funded PRODEP, the World Bank.

Examples of various kinds of failure were not hard to spot in and around the small southern coastal town of Bainet, where HGW did its fieldwork in 2011 and 2012. According to the U.S.-based Pan-American Development Foundation (PADF), PRODEP funded a total of 60 projects in the commune of Bainet, and over 70 percent were “successful”.

But journalists from the capital and from a local community radio station came to a different conclusion when they visited two projects in town. The first, a water purification business run by Òganizasyon Fanm Bene or Organisation of Bainet Women (OFB), and financed with a grant of about 19,000 dollars, never even got off the ground.

“PRODEP/PADF gave us a bunch of machinery that never worked,” claimed an OFB member, who asked that her name not be used, as she unlocked the storefront. Inside, dust-covered machinery filled the room. The plastic bags meant to be filled with purified water lay flat in dusty heaps on the floor.

Nearby, the “OPA-net” cyber-café was also locked up tight. Run by Oganizasyon Peyizan an Aksyon or Organisation Peasants in Action (OPA) and funded with almost 20,000 dollars, according to World Bank documents, the project came to halt on Jan. 12, 2010, the day of the deadly earthquake, according to Coordinator Saint-Gladys Fleuranville.

“It was working very well until then,” he said. “PADF has a Reinforcement Programme that will help us. We are waiting for them because this is the only cyber-café in the entire community.”

Asked about the water and cyber-café projects, PADF’s Arsel Jerome, who runs their PRODEP programme, said he was aware that both were closed down.

“The way those projects began was a little amateurish,” Jerome admitted. So much so that they, and over 100 more of the 700 or so projects PADF oversaw, needed “correction” or “reinforcement”, he said. But Jerome refused to talk of corruption or even waste, calling the issues instead “administrative problems”.

Three years later, the “administrative problems” had not yet been resolved at either project in Bainet. Both remained padlocked.

HGW visited four more projects, in Bainet’s 9th communal section, Anba Grigri, on the other side of the Bainet River and up a bumpy, muddy and rocky road. The hamlet and surrounding hills are home to about 10,000 people who have no electricity, and no access to clean drinking water or modern sanitation. Farmers grow potatoes, corn, sorghum and herd cows and goats; coastal residents fish. For weeks at a time, villagers from Anba Grigri cannot reach Bainet because of the rain-bloated river.

A goat project appears to have been successful.

“Before, not too many of our members had goats. Now almost everyone has a goat because our organisation got the project funding,” said Alezi Jean Bastien, a member of the group that benefited. “Life has improved a little bit for people.”

But three other projects gave cause for concern.

The most infamous grantee is OD9S (Oganizasyon pou Devlòpman 9vyèm Seksyon or Organisation for the Development of the 9th Section), which got 17,500 dollars for a fishing project. Almost immediately, the organisation split over how the money should be used.

The fishermen prevailed, buying new engines and other materials, but an engine was soon stolen and other items disappeared. Today the boats sit in disrepair. Most alarmingly, OD9S fell apart.

“The project dissolved the organisation,” one of the fishermen told HGW.

Nearby, the Coordination of Bainet Woman (Kòdinasyon Fanm Bene or KOFAB) received a grant to set up a corn mill. But that’s not to say that KOFAB runs it. A man is in charge.

“People in the community are employing me,” explained manager Fabien Jean André Paul. “From time to time I meet with the women’s organisation and give them a report.”

Another grantee set up the so-called Community Store of Bainet. The shop stocks the same, mostly imported items that jam shelves in many small stores or “boutiques” throughout the zone: canned goods, rice, beans, spaghetti, cooking oil, tomato paste, crackers, rum and other products.

It sells products at the same prices and doesn’t get much business. During a HGW visit, store manager Delva Henry asked a friend to “buy” something for HGW’s camera.

“There are a lot of other stores in our communal section,” Delva admitted. He said he was thinking of “writing a proposal” to ask for more money so that he could better stock his store.

HGW concluded that PRODEP’s track record in and around Bainet is not “over 70 percent success” and this was confirmed by a member of the PRODEP-formed committee, COPRODEP, that originally picked the projects to be funded.

“The projects didn’t work out the way they were supposed to,” said farmer Emile Theodore. “The majority of them have disappeared. You can’t find a trace of them. There are others that are run by a husband and wife, like the community store. As for the fish project, a little group of people is running that one also.”

The World Bank says that an impact evaluation study completed in 2012 and two technical audits were carried out on a sample of 160 (out of a total of 1,700) subprojects and 20 training programmes. The studies show that 60 percent of the 1,700 subprojects are deemed successful; 20 percent are undergoing a process of strengthening and restructuring; and 20 percent have not produced the intended results.

HGW asked for and was promised the impact evaulation three times by staff from the Haitian government’s Office for the Monetisation of Development Aid projects, but it was never delivered.

“This overall result is consistent with international experiences with community driven development (CDD) projects,” Laurent Msellati, a sector manager at the Bank, told IPS by email.

Part one of two. For part two, click here.

*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

 The full HGW series can be read here.

Excerpt:

Members of the Women’s Network for Unity in Cambodia are fighting for LGBT rights, land rights, peasant rights and human rights. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
PHNOM PENH, Dec 13 2012 (IPS)

For a brief moment last month, mainstream international media turned the spotlight on Cambodia, one of the world’s 48 least developed countries (LDCs), as a high-level visit from U.S. President Barack Obama and the annual summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) gave this country of 14.3 million people a glamorous edge.

The burst of international attention also united many grassroots groups and organisations, which came together under an umbrella called the ASEAN People’s Grassroots Assembly (APGA) – comprised of farmers, fisherfolk, labour unions and other rights groups – to protest the limits of the recently adopted regional human rights declaration, and expose grave rights violations in Cambodia.

The difference is that while international scrutiny and curiosity quickly faded, the activists’ work –against a backdrop of accelerating regional cooperation between ASEAN’s ten member states – is only just beginning.

According to Pisely Ly, a Cambodian legal activist, the most marginalised members of society are just as badly off as they were before Cambodia hosted the annual ASEAN gathering in mid-November.

Sex workers and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, for example, have few protections under the law.

Add to this the intersecting issues of widespread land evictions, loss of livelihoods, women supporting rural families, trafficking and sex work and the grassroots movement here is faced with a long road ahead, she said.

ASEAN integration 2015

Plans to achieve full integration of the 10 ASEAN economies by 2015 also have Cambodian activists on edge.

If the integration roadmap goes according to schedule, member states will experience increased regional trade and investment in the next two years, which AGPA members fear will exacerbate the disastrous impacts of Cambodia’s land policies. Already the government has signed off over 11,000 acres of arable land to various international investors.

The World Policy Institute reported that Chinese investments in Cambodia have spiked since the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement was inked in January 2010, and now comprise 20 percent of total foreign investment in the country.

Vietnam’s investments have grown as well, primarily in rubber plantations.

The consequences of these investments, which often lead to displacement, are grave and far-reaching.

Earlier this month Member of Parliament Mu Sochua visited a community displaced by the Ly Young Phat palm sugar plantation land concession.

“One of the victims of land grabs was dying when we were there. She lost everything to Ly Young Phat. She was pregnant and hunger pushed her to seek food in the forest. She was poisoned by the mushrooms she found…this is an extreme case of the end result of land concessions,” Sochua told IPS.

The New York Times reported earlier this year, “One major problem is the widespread grant of so-called Economic Land Concessions (E.L.C.). Under Cambodia’s 2001 Land Law, the government is allowed to make use of all “private state land” and lease up to about 25,000 acres to a company for as many as 99 years. The government has carved out some of the country’s best land one bit at a time, evicting many poor people for the commercial benefit of a few.”

“We can (no longer) utilise our land to grow food,” said Pen Sothary, a member of the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU) – a 6,400-member collective of sex workers, LGBT people and garment workers based here in Cambodia’s capital, echoing the sentiments expressed during a recent collaboration between the WNU and the AGPA.

Between 2003 and 2008, land concessions in Cambodia affected a quarter of a million people, according to the Cambodian League for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (LICADHO).

Analysts believe a new draft law for 2012 will further weaken peasants’ ownership of their land.

Meanwhile, the ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), which represents civil society within the region, recently released a statement expressing concerns from farmers, fisher folk, sex workers and LGBT people that regional integration could also worsen the situation in Cambodia.

Rural-urban migration fuels sex trade

Pech Sokchea, a transgender woman and member of the WNU, told IPS that these land concessions have resulted in massive evictions and loss of livelihoods.

The problem is particularly severe in a country where 70 percent of the population are subsistence farmers.

To avoid going hungry evictees “often become migrant workers and are at risk of being trafficked”, Sokchea told IPS.

Researcher Melissa Ditmore wrote in a recent WNU report, “High-interest loans lead to landlessness among rural people, and consequently to urban migration.”  Ditmore also found that farmers lose out in credit schemes, and sometimes borrow at a 500 percent interest rate to buy seed. When crops fail, they often lose their land and their homes.

The International Labor Organisation (ILO) has documented rural to urban migration, starting from the mid-1990s, as a trend among women seeking work in garment factories in cities, where they typically earn a monthly salary of no more than 60 dollars a month.

To supplement this meagre income, many also seek part-time work in the ‘entertainment’ industry, which consists of beer gardens, karaoke bars and massage parlors, often serving as fronts for sex work. Back in 2009, the ILO estimated the number of entertainment workers to be over 21,000 in Phnom Penh alone.

Entertainers’ salaries can be as low as 35 dollars a month, while the going rate for sex work is about 25 dollars per night. This wage difference is crucial for people struggling to make ends meet in an economy that calls for a minimum monthly income of 177 dollars. Most women also remit a large portion of their earnings to extended family members still living in the countryside, according to the SOMO research organisation.

Cambodian migrant workers who move around within the region in search of better work may find higher wages outside the country, but no protection for their rights as labourers.

Young Cambodian women working as maids in Malaysia have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse by employers due to scant protection of their rights. “Some women do not get paid and return empty-handed,” Keo Tha, an elected secretary for the WNU, explained to IPS.

“Some are cheated and turn to sex work (in order to survive),” she added. “Some become HIV positive and have no access to healthcare and medicine.” The problem is made worse by the fact that the commercial sex trade is illegal and unregulated.

WNU members are particularly concerned about the impact of the ‘loophole’ in the new ASEAN rights framework, which allows states to adhere to internationally accepted human rights standards only insofar as they do not trample on “cultural and religious” norms in each respective country.

This caveat gives the green light to governments to ignore the rights of, for example, LGBT people, Ly told IPS. Still, she has faith that grassroots activists can come together to unite the many connected issues in the country.

“We believe the people’s voice is very powerful,” Ly added.

(END)

Mexico is facing its worst drought in seven decades. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

While world leaders were wrapping up the United Nations conference on climate change (COP 18) in Doha, Qatar this past weekend with the annual vague promise to tackle the enormous crises brought on by extreme weather and global warming, a delegation of youth gathered far from the high-level conference halls to say “no” to advocacy without action.

At the invitation of the Club of Rome – a renowned think tank that turned heads 40 years ago with the publication of a groundbreaking report, ‘The Limits to Growth’, which brought the concept of sustainable development into mainstream discourse – artists, activists and representatives of major youth coalitions around the world flocked to the Change-Course-Conference in Winterthur, Switzerland, to discuss viable alternatives to the prevailing order.

Calling for a “change of mindset” to stop the warming of the planet, some 60 participants engaged in workshops from Dec. 8 to 11, stressing that high-level political summits such as the one in Doha have, once too often, proven the limits of their efficacy.

Fed up with politicians’ inability to reach binding agreements on carbon emissions cuts and find lasting solutions – beyond the paradigm of continued industrialisation – to the climate crisis, these young people have gone back to the basics, focusing on grassroots action to help communities adapt to climate change.

Referring to a pledge made by rich developed nations in Doha to provide funds to poorer states – particularly to the least developed countries (LDCs) – to deal with the loss and destruction brought on by extreme weather events, Ibrahim Ceesay, executive coordinator of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC), asked IPS, “How do we make sure this is translated into practice?”

The answer, he believes, lies in young people, who have “an important role to play in adaptation and mitigation because they are innovative, energetic and can make the bridge between those who make the policies and those who are affected by them”.

“When I go back to Gambia (his home country), my task will be to tell a woman in a village how she is going to be affected by the warming of the planet.”

The 27-year-old activist and filmmaker said that the AYICC, the biggest youth climate change network in Africa, comprised of 42 country chapters representing a total of 10,000 members around the continent, has done advocacy for the past five years.

“Now we want to stop and help the communities adapt to climate change. Practice what you preach and preach what you practice,” Ceesay added.

Africa currently contributes less than four percent of total global carbon emissions, but the impact of global warming on the continent is disproportionately severe.

This, combined with industrialised nations’ weak track record in adhering to their own emissions reduction targets, has pushed the youth network to work directly with local communities to identify and implement long-lasting solutions to climate change.

“We want to come up with resilience measures and coping strategies, because adaptation funds are not trickling down to those who need them. We have to develop contingency plans and help people to tell their stories. People are dying, we have to move fast,” Ceesay stressed.

A young Namibian named Justine Braby, programme director of AYICC, told IPS, “The new generation is pushing for change because with the world leaders that are in place nothing happens, we are not moving forward.

“Everybody at this conference acknowledges that the current economic system is a problem. We need a global paradigm shift.”

She believes Africa is in a unique position to nurture just this kind of systemic change. “We can either copy-paste the industrialisation (model), which does not work, or we can come up with innovative (alternatives) at the country level.”

A small group of AYICC members recently conducted a survey in a former township in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, asking people about their values and what makes them happy – be it access to basic education or free time.

The results will feed into municipal and national development plans, in an attempt to move beyond gross domestic product (GDP) growth as the sole measure of a country or population’s wellbeing.

“We are not chasing financial growth, which is unrealistic, but the contentment of the people, the well-being of the society,” she explained.

Erdenechimeg Baasandamba, a 30-year-old biologist from Mongolia, is concerned not only about the rapid changes taking place in her country, but also the lack of awareness about the severity of the problem.

“The environment is damaged, rivers are shrinking, mining has become a big issue in my country. But since 60 percent of the population lives in the capital, they are not aware of the changes taking place in the countryside,” she told IPS.

In her opinion, the government doesn’t communicate effectively with mining companies, allowing some of them to wreak havoc on the environment, use up vast quantities of water and avoid conducting any rehabilitation work, thus fuelling conflict with the local population.

Through the People’s Centre for Conservation, a local NGO, Baasandamba has run a radio programme to educate listeners about individual responsibility in the face of a global climate crisis and the choices one can make: such as eating vegetables instead of meat; recycling paper; or riding bicycles instead of having two cars.

She also works with communities in rural areas and organises meetings between researchers and the general public. “Everybody is aware of climate change because it is obvious that it is happening, but most people don’t know how to solve the problem”, even though simple solutions are staring humanity in the face, she said.

Referring to the Mongolian government’s efforts to make changes in response to the climate crisis, she said, “We have wind and 320 days of sun per year, so we produce solar power and are even trying to export it to China.”

(END)