Climate change is forcing girls out of school — here’s what young women want leaders to do about it — Assembly

Young women in Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Pakistan discuss how climate-related events prevent girls from learning.

When monsoons and heavy rainfalls hit Pakistan, 23-year-old Ayesha says that girls are often the first to drop out of school.

“There is a general culture in my community that girls (mostly) have to help with house chores and in some rural areas they are expected to work for more than 12 hours in the field. With the added issues caused by flooding, more labour is required in the fields to make up for the losses,” Ayesha shares. “All of this results in labour that cuts down on girls’ study and school time.”

Around the world climate change is forcing girls out of school. In 2021 climate-related events will prevent at least four million girls in l ow- and lower-middle-in come countries from completing their education. Droughts, floods, increased exposure to zoonotic diseases and air pollution are exacerbating the inequalities girls face, further limiting their ability to learn.

As leaders meet at the COP26 summit this week to discuss how to reduce and mitigate the effects of global warming, young women are calling on them to address the climate crisis’s impact on girls’ education.

In today’s Assembly, young women in Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Pakistan share how climate change is preventing girls in their communities from learning — and what they want to see governments do about it.

Ayesha, Pakistan

The majority of the economy of my country depends on agriculture, which has been affected by climate-caused flooding and unexpected heavy rainfalls and monsoons. There is a general culture in my community that girls (mostly) have to help with house chores and in some rural areas they are expected to work for more than 12 hours in the field. With the added issues caused by flooding, more labour is required in the fields to make up for the losses. This eventually forces all the family members to work in the field even harder and those who have not been in the field also have to provide a helping hand. All of this results in labour that cuts down on girls’ study and school time.

The urban areas are also affected by climate change. Heat waves and urban flooding sometimes lead to the closure of schools. The destruction caused by these natural disasters also leads to unemployment in affected professions like vendors, which eventually makes families cut down on their budgets and stop educating their daughters.

I need to learn how to respond to natural disasters and how to address climate change as an individual and collective issue. It's about time the governments invest in a climate education that is gender-transformative and incorporates climate into all aspects of the core curriculum across 12 years of education. Climate education needs to facilitate critical thinking, learning and responsibility in youth. It should be action-oriented and enable young people to participate in decision-making environments.

I want to see the government strictly checking polluting industries, like mining industries, manufacturing and automotive industries in Pakistan, and shutting them down if their disposal method is hazardous and making climate change worse. Officials should be spreading awareness in masses that climate change is an emergency that we need to respond to immediately, as an individual and as a whole community. The government needs to take a gender-transformative approach in dealing with climate change as the crisis is disproportionately affecting girls and women.

Tadila, Ethiopia

Girls and women in Ethiopia are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Due to climate incidents like drought, women are forced to travel long distances to fetch water. One of the biggest climate-related problems for women is displacement and the various challenges they face as they seek shelter and employment.

In my country there is a lot of work being done to control climate change, like reforestation, educating children about climate change, raising awareness, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and importing electric cars. In 2019 Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pledged to plant four billion seedlings in schools, forests and parks. This meant that 353 seedlings were planted daily in Ethiopia that year.

I suggest that the government do more to educate girls and help them use their full power to address the climate crisis. Educating girls benefits the country as a whole and the world. It has a high impact on the country's economy, which means when girls go to school, the country’s economy is stronger and better equipped to take action against climate change.

Meera*, India

In my community, most of the girls dropping out of school are leaving because of the effects of climate change, like floods, droughts and cyclones. These weather events cause crop damage and impact fishing, which causes high seasonal migration and poverty as India is an agricultural country. When this happens, the older family members leave to earn money and all the responsibilities of the house rests on the girls, which means they can’t go to school.

Even in cities, girls are not able to go school when the haze and pollution levels are so high. In past few years year schools and colleges were closed for days to try to protect students’ from air pollution. Those were some of the most unhealthy days in my life living in that environment. People were suffering from many diseases, like eye problems, asthma, breathing problems and throat pain.

I would like the government to take serious action about climate change. The government should make strict rules for factories and industrial estates — and if they don’t follow those rules, the government should seize their license for a few months.

The government should also start a climate change curriculum in schools. I want to learn how I can contribute to solving this big issue. I want to be able to talk to other people about the climate change issue because many people do not know about it. Our media is not talking much about climate change and serious issues in the world.

I also think the government should replace petrol vehicles with electric vehicles in addition to increasing the price of petrol vehicles so that people prefer cycling and social transport.

Tamilore, Nigeria

In Nigeria, climate change has a great effect on people and communities. Climate-related weather events are displacing individuals from their homes and families, causing hunger as a result of food scarcity and destroying properties.

But I have learnt that its effects expose the vulnerability of women and girls and their lack of power. For example, during climate-related events, girls have to assist their parents financially and help provide food for the family when there’s scarcity.

Climate change has major effects on education — like damaging school buildings, limiting students’ access to schools, affecting concentration of students from hunger and causing poor hygiene in some of the schools. Girls face more challenges than boys when it comes to how climate change impacts their education. Girls sometimes miss school to help their mothers source food for the family. Some girls stop going to class because the parents prefer to support their boy children’s education when income is tight. And when families have to move after a climate episode, parents are skeptical of sending their girl children really far distances for schooling.

Arooj, Pakistan

The girls in my country face a myriad of barriers in their education due to changes in climate. In Pakistan, many people depend on agriculture for their livelihood and climate change has had an adverse effect on seasonal crops with untimely floods, monsoons, and rising temperatures. This forces many families to take their daughters out of school in order to save money and continue running the household. In many areas of Pakistan, clean water has also become scarce. Changes in climate and human actions — such as industrial discharge — cause sources of water to become polluted and toxic. With poverty, untimely weather changes and a lack of food and water, it may become harder and harder for girls to attend school. Many families expect girls to stay home and do chores or take care of their younger siblings while the elders go out in search of work and income as well. Other than that, climate change also causes uncertainty in the financial stability of many laborers and farmers but also other workers connected to agriculture.

Climate change is often talked about in my community, but I think it continues to be something we “should” be worried about instead of something that we are worried about. The information about local effects of climate change is lacking and limited to an idea that weather is shifting, causing changes in rain patterns. The effects are not connected to the daily life of most people, especially in big cities.

The closest I ever came to learning about climate change through mainstream media was a few years ago when there was so much smog in my city that people started getting sick and you couldn't even see the roads properly. However, no long-term action was taken. Brick kilns and some factories were closed down for a few months but that was it. The current government focuses on climate change but most of their initiatives include planting trees and there is no effort to educate the people about the adverse effects of the climate crisis.

I think there is a lot that I should be learning about climate change which I am not. The quality of science education in Pakistan is already dismal. The closest we come to learning about climate change is a rare election campaign advertisement on television where some politician is talking about how many trees they have planted this year or annual tree planting events. Only when you dive much deeper and try to research on this, you find scarcely available data and reports on how people don’t have access to clean water, suffer through drought and how farming practices are changing and leaving farmers empty handed due to climate change. Considering Pakistan is an agricultural country and a lot of our culture, economy and livelihood depend on it, climate change should be talked about a lot more.

Climate change should be a part of the curriculum being taught in schools and should be made relevant to the daily life of students. There is a need to create urgency and talk about what climate change is, how it is going to affect us in the future and how it is affecting us and the people around us now. Increasing literacy about climate change, practices that lead to it and those that can lead away from it will benefit not just the individual and community but the entire nation. This can include short films, video clips, textbooks, stories and discussions about how it specifically relates to Pakistan. Schools should also highlight the brilliant women in Pakistan who are working on the climate change issue. These things should also be broadcasted on mainstream media and the intensity of this issue should be highlighted.

Meti, Ethiopia

Climate change has prevented so many girls and young women all over my country from learning. From floods completely destroying schools to floods damaging our economy, we see the effects of climate change every day.

Ethiopia has been doing very well in tackling the climate issue thus far by enacting innovative initiatives all around the country. One of these solutions is the tree planting initiative we have been participating in that aims to plant six billion trees across the country this year. I have seen the great impact planting millions of seedlings last year has brought to this year’s winter. For many years now Ethiopian winters have been shorter and more sporadic — but this year is different. Grandparents say that it reminds them of the winter of their childhood. By simply making the climate issue a priority and planting trees we have been able to turn the situation around. That means that maybe, just maybe, it is not too late to address the climate crisis.

If I had to pinpoint a weakness it would be the school system. At the moment, other than a small description of what climate change is, it is not incorporated in any formal curriculum. If climate change was incorporated into the curriculum, there would be more children that are aware of the issue who would grow up to be conscious adults. I don’t think the public perceives climate change as a fact because there really isn't a lot of data that is easily understood by the general public. As long as that information isn’t accessible, the world will not understand that this is an urgent matter.

However, I do worry by the time we get to incorporating this into our education systems it would already be too late for the world. Scientists have been warning us that this is an urgent issue for over a decade and even seeing the effects in our lives has not gotten us to believe that it is real.

Alice, Brazil

Starting from the Indigenous context in Brazil, we experienced the direct impact of the pandemic not only on education, but on our social structure, our culture and our social constructions. The pandemic aggravated school dropout rates as many girls dropped out of school because they were unable to access distance learning. Inequality was clearly much more visible than ever, and in the Indigenous schools, the damage was even greater. Away from classrooms and in the face of financial difficulties many students — and particularly female students — had to find a job to help their families, and even though classes resumed on a semi-attendance basis, those students did not return to school.

And this reality was not exclusive to my village or to my people. Several peoples and villages face the same problem, inequality distances young people away from accessing education, especially in the midst of a health crisis. Brazil experienced this intensely. The pandemic that rampantly killed more than 600,000 Brazilians is still around here, there is now a fight for vaccination, for the reopening of schools, which often cannot secure sanitation safety. There is now a student force across the country that together demand urgent measures for the returning to school.

Portuguese:

Partindo do contexto indígena no Brasil, vivemos o ataque direto da pandemia não só na educação, mas em nossa estrutura social, cultura e construções sociais. A pandemia agravou a evasão escolar, muitas meninas desistiram da escola por não terem acesso ao ensino remoto, a desigualdade se tornou mais clara do que nunca, e nas escolas indígenas o prejuízo foi ainda maior, longe das salas de aula, diante das dificuldade financeiras muitos alunos e principalmente alunas precisaram começar a trabalhar para ajudar suas famílias, e mesmo com o retorno semi-presencial, esses não retornaram às salas de aula.

E essa realidade não foi exclusividade da minha aldeia ou do meu povo. Diversos povos e aldeias enfrentam o mesmo problema, a desigualdade distância os jovens a ter acesso a educação, principalmente no meio de uma crise de saúde, o Brasil viveu isso intensamente, a pandemia que desenfreada matou mais de 600 mil brasileiros ainda não nos deixou, existe agora uma luta pela vacinação, pelo retorno das escolas, que não conseguem garantir a segurança sanitária muitas vezes. Existe agora a força estudantil em todo o país que juntos pedem com urgência providências para o retorno escolar.

Amina, Nigeria

Changes in climate — such as variable rainfall and land degradation — can affect girls’ ability to attend school, which disrupts their learning processes and affects the quality of their education. For example, people lose their homes during heavy rainfall because their houses are built from mud. This causes internal displacement.

There is also food insecurity — especially for the rice farmers — because of weather events, poverty, increasing population and less food production because of the high rate of banditry and kidnappings. The food shortages affect schooling too as most school children do not have enough food to eat before or after school.

To address these issues, the government should take bold, ambitious climate action. They should provide shelter for the displaced people. They should also provide security for farmers and members of the communities so that children have enough to eat, can stay in school and reach their maximum potential.

I also want to see the government introduce a climate change curriculum in schools and create awareness campaigns so that all citizens will take part in tackling the crisis. Additionally, the government should implement strict penalties to those contributing to deforestation. Leaders should encourage planting of trees around the communities and country at large.

*Editor’s note: Meera is a pseudonym.