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Setting the stage
I am Jane McConnell, and welcome to Imaginize World. Today we need to focus on the future for new generations. What kind of world do we want them to live in and how can we help them build it?
Greetings. Today I’m with Vanessa Nakate, the author of “A Bigger Picture”, and she’s a climate activist based in Uganda. Her book is amazing because it’s educational, it’s full of facts and science. It’s very even-toned. It’s personal. She shares her journey with us and she doesn’t hold back about feelings she’s had and concerns she’s had during her personal advancement and it’s actionable, things that we can do. Today I’m going to ask her about the way she sees challenges today, and in particular how she feels children should be educated. What can we be doing to make children ready for a world of climate activism?
Vanessa’s personal journey as a climate activist in Uganda
So let’s go join Vanessa.
Vanessa, could you tell me a little bit about your personal journey from where you started to where you are today? I think you’ve had an incredible story.
VANESSA
Yes, thank you very much. My journey started in 2018. That is when I started to do research about some of the challenges that the people in my country Uganda were facing. And I got to learn that climate change was one of those challenges and it was already impacting the lives of so many people, especially in the eastern part of the country, in areas of Bududa, areas of Bundibugyo. And in that time, I felt like I wanted to do something about this. I didn’t know exactly what to do and that is where the Fridays for Future Movement that was started by Greta became an inspiration for me because I saw this was a way to raise awareness about the impact of climate change in my country.
Strikes every Friday
So I decided to start organizing climate strikes every Friday. I had my very first strike in the first week of January in 2019. And for a couple of months I did strikes every Friday. And I remember being nine months later, I got an invitation from the UN Youth Climate Summit and I was invited to attend that summit. It would be the first International Climate Conference that I attended. It was in New York, and I had the opportunity to meet different young people, many that I had seen and worked with virtually. And for me, that is where my journey of also participating in the international space actually started.
JANE
And so after the event in New York, you met a lot of these people, you connected with them in person, how did you then continue working?
Invited to join Greenpeace delegation
Yes, so after New York, I came back home. I continued to do my climate strike. Sometimes I would also carry out visits in schools to carry out climate education, especially in primary schools. So that is what most of the work that I was doing. I remember later on I was invited by Greenpeace to be a part of the Greenpeace delegation to attend COP 25, which was in Madrid. That was my second appearance in the international climate spaces. And it was a bit different from the UN Youth Climate Summit because now there were much more people, many more events and a lot of things to really participate in and get involved in.
WEF in DAVOS and being cropped out of the photo
And later on, I think the following month, I got invited to the World Economic Forum, and that was in Davos, 2020, January. And that is where most people started to know me because I happened to be cropped out of a picture with the fellow activists from Europe. And when I responded to the picture, I reached so many people than I really expected, and it introduced me to a much bigger audience.
JANE
What’s really interesting, I read about that, I had heard about it a few years ago, but I didn’t connect it to you until I read your book. I think in a way, I don’t know if you agree with me or not, it ended up being very positive for you. It brought you to international attention. Do you think it would have a good impact?
VANESSA
Yes, that moment of course brought me to, really it introduced me to a lot of people because my response to it kind of went viral, if that is the language that I can use. And it reached so many people across the world and my voice became, it reached many more people. But I can’t say it’s a moment that I appreciate that it happened because it was really a frustrating moment. No one really wants to go through that in their life because it was really sad and heartbreaking for me to experience that.
I think there would still have been other ways for my voice to still reach thousands of people without me having been cropped out. First, you can say it even for people who make money, some people will make money in the right way, some people will make money in the wrong way. At the end, they both make money, but doesn’t mean that they are both right about it. It’s not really just about the means that lead to the end. I think there could have been another way for my voice to reach millions of people without me having been cropped out.
The Green Schools Project and its impact on schools in Uganda
That’s an interesting viewpoint. It sounds very wise to me, like a voice of experience, even though you’re several decades younger than I am, I won’t give you my age, but it sounds like you’ve gained a lot of experience over the few short years that you’ve been operational. Could you tell us, something I found really interesting because interested in education of children in particular, could you talk about what the Green Schools Project? I think that’s a very, very interesting project that you started a couple years ago, ago.
VANESSA
Yes. In 2019.
JANE
2019, right. So that’s been five years now.
VANESSA
Yeah.
JANE
Can you talk about it a little bit, what it is and the impact it had?
VANESSA
Yes. So in 2019, I started the Vash Green Schools Project, and this is a project that involves installing solar panels and clean cooking stoves in schools in Uganda. And what we were doing, especially in the rural schools of the country, we were giving a school a solar panel so that the solar panel can be able to light up two classrooms and provide security to the schools and also the office, the main office of the school. And this is a way to also help schools understand that there is a more sustainable way of accessing electricity.
And then for the clean cooking stoves, many of the schools in Uganda use firewood for the preparation of food. More than 90% use firewood. So what the clean cooking stoves do, they help to reduce on the amount of firewood, they reduce on the consumption of firewood that schools use in preparation of food. They don’t eliminate the complete use of firewood because, I mean, we don’t have the means yet to make those kinds of stoves or even to purchase them. So what we are doing is constructing these clean cooking stoves so they can reduce on the firewood, in the process reduce on the strain of cutting down trees to provide this firewood.
And this project started with one school. We’ve now been able to reach 75 schools. We hope to reach many more schools. It has impacted more than 20,000 children now. We hope to reach more schools. We hope to see even the project improve to the place of not just having stoves that reduce on firewood consumption, but actually stoves that eliminate the consumption of firewood.
Climate problems are not local problems
Something that comes across in your book repeatedly, and it’s something that for me it wasn’t completely new, but the impact was strongly expressed, the impact was new for me. And that is the fact that when there’s a climate tragedy in a place in the world, there’s actually an impact that goes far beyond that place. It can be on a global scale or regional scale, but climate problems are not local problems.
VANESSA
Yes, I completely agree with that. And this is something that we used to say a lot, especially when I had just started activism. We would say a lot of what happens in the Arctic for example, doesn’t end in the Arctic. What happens in the Amazon rainforest or the Congo rainforest doesn’t end there because these are all really vital ecosystems that play a huge part in the survival and wellbeing of human beings and also other living organisms like the animals.
So for me, when it comes to climate disasters, what really exacerbates these disasters, when you look at the science, it has been the burning of fossil fuels. When fossil fuels are burned in another country, the impact may be felt elsewhere. A new coal power power plant may be in Europe or in a country within Europe, may have a really terrible impacts in the end for a country in the global south because we live in a really interconnected ecosystem. And when fossil fuel or when greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, they’re not only going to be concentrated in the atmosphere that surrounds or that is over a specific country. This atmosphere, it is for all of us, as humanity. So that’s why I think that whatever action that may happen in another country may bring really terrible impacts on another country in the process.
And that’s why I think we’ve seen that when you look at countries that have historically benefited from the burning of fossil fuels, many of them are not on the front lines of the impact of the climate crisis. It is countries in the global south, countries in the African continent that are suffering the most with climate impacts. So you really see the injustice of the climate crisis. You really see the horrible reality of the climate crisis.
We are a connected ecosystem
I had the opportunity to visit one of the places that were impacted by a terrible drought that was at Turkana in the Horn of Africa. And I remember having some conversations with the people about the drought, and many of them, they were surprised to learn that it is the burning of fossil fuels that is exacerbating situations like this. And then you find that people will say, “But our countries are actually not burning or extracting fossil fuels like countries in the global north.” So it was really hard for people to understand the connection between the two and was also sad for them because then they were asking us, “Why are we the ones suffering? Why are we the ones on the front lines? Why is it our communities that are having weather patterns disrupted?”
So I really believe that what happens in another place doesn’t just affect that place, it ends up affecting other parts of the world because we are a connected kind of ecosystem.
JANE
Yeah, and an ecosystem that includes not just humans, but also other life forms, also animals, plants and so on, which is forgotten very often. You created, or you were instrumental in creating, a movement called the Rise Up Movement.
VANESSA
Yeah.
Rise Up, a platform to amplify and share opportunities
And I saw on your Instagram account you say that the idea is to give African climate activists a platform for their voices to be heard by the world. So that’s African countries in general, whose voices are not yet sufficiently being heard by the world, which is a little bit what we were already talking about. And Rise Up, if I understand correctly, is an umbrella group that brings together different groups. Is it easy to bring together a lot of different groups working on the problem, even if they’re working in different ways?
VANESSA
Well, sometimes it’s not easy because every group has their own kind of beliefs and also there are differences. There’ll always be differences. Even when you are working within one group, there’ll be differences among people. So if you’re working with different groups, there are obviously differences as well. So it’s really not easy.
But then we’ve been able to focus most of the work of what Rise Up has been doing to amplify and share opportunities to the people that we are able to support through Rise Up regardless of where they come from or what they believe in or what group they are a part of. So we’ve kind of focused more on the vision of why it was started, and that is to help people amplify their stories, the stories of their communities when it comes to the climate crisis.
And what we’ve been doing as Rise Up, we’ve been trying to, we’ve tried different ways of doing this. Most of the work, of course, has been very voluntary from the very beginning. So trying to make blogs, trying to do interviews, trying to mobilize resources for activists to be able to attend climate conferences like the COP. So that is what we’ve been doing mostly.
Building capacity and mobilizing resources
Now we are starting to lean more into capacity building, but also continuing to mobilize resources for activists to attend climate conferences. But when it comes to differences, I think differences will always be among us. We even find them in our families, even spouses find that they have differences and they find a way to work together to make their marriages work even with the differences because we may never agree on everything, but once we find our place of alignment and our place of alignment is climate advocacy, then we advance that. We work towards that, and that is how we’ve been, we’ve tried to move as a movement.
JANE
What are the biggest challenges today?
VANESSA
Well, it’s a very big question because there is a lot of things that are happening around the world, but I’ll speak more from the climate perspective because that is what I really understand the most. The climate on our planet and the climate crisis, I think that may be one of the biggest challenges that we face right now. There’s a shot I usually put on that has there is no music on a dead planet, but that can be anything. It can be there is no business on a dead planet. There is no joy on a dead planet. There is no education on a dead planet. So I think that most of the things that we do or that ensure that people thrive on this planet, it depends on the planet being in a good place as well.
Climate disasters are the biggest challenges today
Because even when someone, we’ve seen economies or countries build infrastructure for years, for decades, and then just one climate disaster happens and all the infrastructure is destroyed, and you find that what took a country 20 years, 30 years to build has been destroyed in less than a week. So it really shows that climate disasters are some of the biggest challenges that we see right now because it’s not just about rising global temperatures. I think it affects every aspect of life because we’ve seen hospitals destroyed, we’ve seen schools destroyed, we’ve seen work spaces, we’ve seen farms destroyed. So you realize that in the end, there is no true living on a dead planet.
Leadership is a service towards the people that you are leading
You talk about leadership, and I really liked what you said, “Leaders aren’t making the decisions we need. The planet is being destroyed, people’s livelihoods are being wrecked,” as you were just talking about. And I was wondering if the problem and lack of leadership is because the public’s not aware of it, the importance of it, or why is there a lack in leadership in your opinion? Because it seems so obvious.
VANESSA
Well, for me, I think that the true definition of leadership is what is truly lacking. Personally, I understand leadership as service and this service is towards the people that you are leading. I think that is what makes a true, a true leader, that is what makes a great leader. And a leader who has a heart of a servant or someone that is ready to serve the people that they lead is a leader who will ensure that their planet is protected, is a leader who will ensure that they have access to clean air, access to clean water, access to the basic necessities of life.
I just think that that is what is really lacking, what leadership really is. For me, it’s service towards the people. And if you are serving the people, then you will ensure that they have access to the basic needs of life. And I think our leaders are not yet doing that because even when we see that they are starting to move in the right direction of saying they’re going to do this, then they kind of go back on their promises. We’ve seen a number of promises made and not fulfilled.
So it has been frustrating. It hasn’t been very easy being an activist when you see all these statements and declarations, promises being made at climate conferences and then months later something different happens and it feels very, very sad. So I think it’s really the place of defining what true leadership is. But also we, as the people that are not in the leadership places, I believe we also have a place of putting the leaders, voting for the leaders that we believe to make change in our communities, and also being able to hold them accountable.
How can young people get the information and tools they need to make change?
Sometimes, I think in general, that there is hope in the young generation coming up now. I mean people even younger than you, kids who are in school, who are aware of what’s going on with the climate because they see it where they live in the north and in the south. And you make a point that our educational systems need to be offering systems and tools, making things available to young people from an early age to understand the situation and show how they can do something about it. What kind of systems and tools do you think they need? Do they need information? How can they become actionable at a young age?
VANESSA
I think climate education is a powerful tool. I remember when I was in school, I did learn about climate change, but then it was like something a part of the syllabus, in geography you learn about climate change, it was more of the theory part of it. We didn’t get the urgency that there was a crisis happening. We didn’t get the urgency that we should do something about it.
JANE
Yes, that’s the missing piece, isn’t it? Maybe in schools today, with young people today, with what’s going on, it’s easier with stories that people tell, people like you and other activists, you can make young people more aware.
VANESSA
Yeah, I think that has been helpful in some of the schools that we have visited because when you actually go to a school and you ask a student, “What is climate change? What does it mean to you?” They’ll give you the definition that we also got. That is what they know. But when you ask them, “Do you think it’s happening? Do you think it’s a crisis?” Many of them can’t really connect to what is in the theory, in the books, but to what is happening in the actual world.
The missing piece is the sense of urgency
So I think that is where the missing piece is, and that is where we say climate education is really needed. Not just topics that are a topic on climate change because we had those topics, but they didn’t show us that this was a crisis. They didn’t empower us to do something. They didn’t empower us to raise awareness. And I think that is what is really missing when it comes to students. If only we have more activists in this spaces speaking to students and motivating them to do something.
And I’ve had the opportunity to speak to students of different ages, even students who are from ages of three to six, and you realize that their thinking is different. The way you speak to a child who is five is not the same way you speak to a child who is nine. Because a child who is five, they won’t understand the climate crisis, but they’ll understand their favorite animal, and many of them they want to do, they’ll grow up with the love of ensuring that their favorite animal is protected. And that is what eventually grows into what now you teach a nine-year-old who knows that a water bottle is important because that is what they understand that if I carry my water bottle, then I’m not going to have to buy water in a plastic bottle. That is what they understand.
With the different ages, the way you speak and educate is important. Yes, it’s very important to start from a young age because then you’re setting the foundation of what these young people are going to be as they continue to grow up. That foundation may be from starting to talk about them about the importance of protecting your favorite animal. And for them it may be ensuring that their favorite bud is protected. That is what they understand, that is what they can comprehend. But eventually that grows into someone who is really vocal about the environment.
JANE
Do you have, Vanessa, do you have any last thoughts that you’d like to communicate? I didn’t cover all the questions that I had sent you, but I had too many questions for the time of our interview, do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share?
Appreciate all the people who walked before me so I could run
Maybe to, I don’t know if I should say my fellow young people, I don’t know if I’m still considered a young person because I’m now 27, but to the young people across the world, sometimes it can be hard. And sometimes I can’t believe that I’ve been doing activism for half a decade now. It’s really hard to really comprehend that this has been going on for this long time. And for other young people, it can be frustrating, but it’s really important to embrace the community within the movement. That is really very helpful because it really helps you in knowing that you’re not doing this work by yourself. And there are many other young people that are working with you, even older people that are working with you.
And also, the other thing that has helped me has been to appreciate the people who came before I started activism, because it’s important to know that we stand on certain, we stand on the roots of certain people. We stand on foundations that were set by certain people, we stand on their shoulders. I personally, the respect I have for people who started activism even before I started, I think that is another thing that has helped me because I know that every new baptism is a result of an old womb. I believe that there wouldn’t be an existence of my activism if someone hadn’t set a certain foundation.
There’s something that people say that some people walked so that others could run. And I believe it sometimes because some people may have walked so that people like me can run in the activist space and be able to access certain spaces that we never thought that we would be able to access.
So for me, it’s appreciate the community within the movement and also appreciate the people that came before us in this space, and also appreciate yourself and the work that you are doing.
JANE
Thank you very much for this. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
VANESSA
Thank you.
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