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When it comes to climate work in Africa, inequality is rampant between local “workers in the field” and mostly Global North partners in leadership roles. Climate entrepreneur Joshua Amponsem is advocating for the visibility and representation of local knowledge bearers! His big idea? Lifting up local voices and expertise with early funding and opportunities through academia, policy and finance. Empowering the next generation of local leaders in the Global South, here’s Joshua Amponsem on Climate Curious.

Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Maryam Pasha
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst

Transcript

[00:00:00] Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite sized nuggets of climate goodness from our TEDxLondon experts in under five minutes.

[00:00:09] Ben Hurst: In this week’s Climate Curious, recorded live at TED Countdown, we’re looking at the absurd inequality of climate work. This week’s guest, the Director of the Youth [00:00:20] Climate Justice Fund, Joshua Mponsen, says that when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, the majority of the workforce in Africa believe that their role in the climate crisis is the most important.

[00:00:30] His labor intensive, low income work, not in the strategic, analytical, or leadership based spaces. Joshua wants to [00:00:40] change that, and he’s got a solution that works across academia, finance and policy. So let’s head over to Joshua to hear more. Stay curious. My big

[00:00:52] Joshua Amponsem: idea is that we cannot. Achieve this green transition towards a [00:01:00] world where we move away from extraction and fossil fuel and create this better world that we’re looking for if we cannot or don’t pay enough attention to investing in the workforce, the people who are going to do the work, the actual work of this transition.

[00:01:18] So if you [00:01:20] think of the world we live in now, you know, a lot of the concentration and the pressure, the design and everything is very much focused on the big leaders, right? So we put pressure on leaders. We have expectations on them. Um, but the majority of people who wake up every day and go to work, [00:01:40] other people who are actually driving this economy, and there’s a huge inequality that exists between that workforce And those who are driving those decisions.

[00:01:51] And I think that is an enormous opportunity if you could actually build that people power. The big idea is that in the global South and [00:02:00] in emerging economies, the workforce is not trusted, it’s not resourced, and they are not equipped. And there is a pending, uh, failure that is going to happen with this transition if we do not equip them.

[00:02:14] Let’s take the transition to renewables as an example. [00:02:20] We need a lot of critical minerals for that. So let’s break it down. We need copper. We need, you know, lithium for batteries, for storage. We need a lot of aluminium, a lot of zinc. So we need all these minerals that would help us to do this transition.

[00:02:37] So if you think of your, you know, electric [00:02:40] vehicle, or you think of, uh, you know, even your cell phone, right? Your laptop, your coffee maker, everything that you use now has elements of these minerals in them. What is happening now and has been happening over the years is that in the emerging economies and the global south at large, where majority [00:03:00] of these minerals are, The benefit of extracting these minerals do not go to them.

[00:03:05] What happens is that the, uh, always, majority of the workforce there have to do the hard work, the labor intensive work, digging the ground. So the perception is that, you know, the workforce there are [00:03:20] workers in the field. And we leave them there and we bring in some managers, some executive leaders who set up the company, they run the big corporations and within those countries, the workforce are just workers in the field.

[00:03:34] And that is the inequality that I see because the workforce there, [00:03:40] they don’t want to be workers in the field. It is intentional systems that have kept them as workers in the field. And if you want to change that, we’d have to radically invest. In sectors like the academic institutions, that is where the bottleneck is, because as it stands now, [00:04:00] we’re taking the minerals, you know, most workforce in those communities are poor.

[00:04:05] They are not part of the formal economy. As I said, you know, the entire Africa know about 83 percent of all the employment is in the informal economy. No taxes. No social protection, [00:04:20] no formal contracts. So it’s very fragile. How do we convey that into an integration where that can be part of the formal economy, where those workers, those workforce and the students who are coming out can be part of a process where their leadership is [00:04:40] respected, their expertise is respected, and they are not subjected to be workers in the field, but rather executive leaders.

[00:04:47] and people who actually drive the transition in their own countries.

[00:04:57] We set up the youth climate justice fund for [00:05:00] several reasons, but one of the ones that very important. To me was how do we provide resources to grassroots young leaders who understand the context in their home countries or their communities who know what change needs to happen, but I’m not [00:05:20] trusted. How do we get the resources to those on the frontline communities where we know that a lot of these changes is needed?

[00:05:28] How do we make that happen? So we started the fund, uh, and what we’ve done is providing. Uh, small and medium grants to grassroots organizations between 80, [00:05:40] 000 supporting organizations that are purely youth led to work on the intersection of climate change and social justice issues because the climate issue, I mean, a lot of what I’m talking about now, it’s not necessarily a climate problem, it’s just social injustice, right?

[00:05:54] And an economic inequity that happens and that has been perpetrated for many years. So we cannot take the [00:06:00] climate issue and treat it as an independent issue away from all these issues. inequality that have existed for years and has to some extent even been normalized. Right. So how do we change that?

[00:06:10] And how do we bring the two together? So we are investing in groups to do that. But the most critical part is making sure that this work is led [00:06:20] by the people who understand what happens in their community and it’s their lives. They wake up every day to the situation. They need to be trusted and they need to be handed resources to lead this way.

[00:06:37] The challenge we face is [00:06:40] that How do people become leaders of the institutions that they are running today, right? Because, well, one of the main ways I know happens is that people author a very fantastic research, right? And it gives a lot of insights and based on that, people start referencing that work.

[00:06:59] And the [00:07:00] more people keep referencing that, you know, they get invited to speak somewhere and before you know, you know, there’s a new institution that have been set up to implement some big ground changes either by, you know, development organizations or, you know, foreign aid investments and all of that.

[00:07:16] And they are called to head those institutions. The [00:07:20] starting point is always that they put something out in the world With their name attached to it, they get identified by that and then they become the leaders of these institutions. Now the reason why we are falling short on that with local leaders is the fact that there is, there has [00:07:40] been for many years, little amount of resources committed in the hands of the researchers locally.

[00:07:47] So, for all the funding that was dedicated for climate research in Africa, Almost about 80 percent of that ended up in global North institutions, right? Which [00:08:00] means that those institutions are the ones with the resource going to these countries in Africa and doing the research. They become the lead authors between 2016 and 2020.

[00:08:12] 70 percent of the most cited research papers on climate were all authored by global North researchers. [00:08:20] So they get referenced, they become the bearers of the knowledge. Right. And in most cases, they’ve gone to these countries. They’ve worked with local researchers there, right. They probably mentioned them in the acknowledgement or maybe the, I don’t know, their name is last in the chain of the authorship, whatever.

[00:08:37] But the people who will get [00:08:40] contacted to speak on this issue are going to be the lead authors. And by doing that, and by being referenced, Right. So he’s going to go, you know, the first name, the first author, and then et al, the rest, you know, they are there, but it’s the first author, they get reference, they get acknowledge, and they get more visibility for their knowledge and their ownership of that [00:09:00] knowledge, which is fundamentally has been wrong, but has been normalized within the academic sector.

[00:09:05] And I think that have to change. And, and to my point, I think we have to understand that if we keep doing this. We are literally going to fail. We won’t solve any of the challenges we have today when it comes to climate because what we are doing [00:09:20] basically is that we are suppressing the capacity of the people who understand the issue better than most and who could be better of their own knowledge.

[00:09:29] And could have the ownership of the solutions, making sure that they are durable, they are lasting, and they can be sustained. And that is what we are missing today.[00:09:40]

[00:09:44] So, for the Youth Climate Justice Fund, it’s very easy, ycjf. org. For the work in Africa, you can look at Green Africa Youth. You get information about the projects that we are doing there, the work with the universities [00:10:00] in Africa, the introduction of these new courses, new programs, working with the current informal sector, particularly within the secular economy waste management sector, getting our government and our institutions to Believe that young people, uh, are not, you know, just again, workers in [00:10:20] the field.

[00:10:20] They are here to help government, to help intergovernmental organizations, help multilateral institutions to understand how they can work with future generations and the current youth, young generation in achieving the same goal we all have, which is how do we make the world a better [00:10:40] place? for ourselves and for the next generation.

[00:10:43] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.

[00:10:45] Maryam: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDxLondon. Until next time,

[00:10:50] Ben Hurst: stay curious.

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