Timestamps:
00:00 – 00:34 – Intro
00:35 – 02:02 – How does climate change disproportionately affect young girls and women?
02:03 – 04:29 – Triple C: Climate Change, Conflict and COVID
04:30 – 04:42 – Outro
Show Notes
Girls Not Brides – The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage is an international non-governmental organization with the mission to end child marriage throughout the world.
The Triple C: Climate Change, Conflict and COVID
Transcript
Intro
Maryam Pasha 0:01
Welcome to climate quickies, bite size nuggets of climate goodness from our TEDx London experts in under five minutes.
Ben Hurst 0:08
In this week’s climate quickie we hear from Dr. Faith Mwangi-Powell, the CEO of Girls Not Brides on why the climate crisis is Code Red for God’s faith explains the lead between climate change and child marriage, why extreme weather pushes families to diversify their source of income, and why it goes education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet. Let’s head over to faith to hear more. Stay curious.
How does climate change disproportionately affect young girls and women?
Faith Mwangi-Powell 0:35
Now climate change is become a big thing. Everybody’s talking about it. So it’s like, let’s have a conversation around this on the table. But the link is this, if you look at the Horn of Africa, where families are becoming desperate because their crops are not yielding because of drought, their cows are dying because they don’t have anything to feed the cows. They are literally people are being getting into desperate situations because they have no livestock they have no no yields because of drought. And this drought is causing families to think okay, what is the alternative and Gauss have become the commodity to sell, because there is nothing else if you have six children or your cows have died because of climate of drought, or your crops have not yielding, you need to feed your children, what do you do? It’s very easy for somebody to say how few cows to give you for your daughter that reduces the mouths to feed right. So there are so many issues which are really making families very desperate because climate change is increasing vulnerabilities on the household level. And when vulnerabilities increase domestic issues include you know, violence increase child marriage increases, because people are looking for ways to survive, because people have to survive.
Triple C: Climate Change, Conflict and COVID
So, we are looking at three, three words. Now we are looking at climate change, we are looking at conflict, and we are looking at COVID. So those are the Triple C. So and we are seeing that with climate change. I’ve talked about it, we are looking at conflict, of course conflict increases vulnerabilities, humanitarian settings, and that when there are humanitarian crisis, the people who are most at risk are women and girls, rape marriage, just shoot through the roof. And COVID There is an estimation that because of school closures, there is an estimated 10, I think is 100 millions more child marriages which are going to happen right by 2030. Just because of what COVID has done. Yeah, what COVID is likely to even be doing this undo by 2019. I keep telling people the world we woke up in in 2019 does not exist. We are in a very different world in 2019. We had hope child marriages were declining in Asia, child marriages were declining in Ethiopia, we were seeing progress. People are excited about change. COVID was also on the move. Now we we are in a verge of reversing some of those gains we have heard if we are not accelerating the efforts, really. I talk about peace, trade and climate change. Let’s have peace. Let’s have trade so that people have money, people have income. And then let’s address climate change. from a gender perspective. Let’s make it gender, gender response. Let’s include women and girls in the solution because they know what they need to be able to do better in their own families, people have solutions. They just need to be given the opportunities.
Because for me, while there is no silver bullet, and I say this a lot, education comes close, that if you give a girl education and opportunity and I’m not just talking numeracy and literacy, it’s not about math, it’s really giving people skills so that they can use it. So in the midst of the crisis and all that I’m seeing the human spirit, I’m seeing the resilience of human beings and I’m seeing the enormous innovativeness of people, women and girls, even girls themselves, stepping up and being champions for themselves and saying, This is what we want.
Outro
Ben Hurst 4:29
Thanks for listening to this quickie.
Maryam Pasha 4:31
This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDx London, and supported by our headline partner, the global bank Citi. Until next time,
Ben Hurst 4:41
stay curious.
