NGO launches climate justice fellowship for young activists in Lake Chad Basin

The DEAN Initiative, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), has launched the Lake Chad Climate Justice Fellowship for young activists.

The 24-month programme is aimed at equipping 20 young climate activists across Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon with the tools and support to lead climate justice advocacy in their communities.

Announcing the fellowship in Abuja, Doren Oho, project officer and grants and resource management associate at DEAN Initiative, said the programme is funded by the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) and is focused on long-term community transformation.

Oho said the initiative will combine storytelling, digital advocacy, policy engagement, and gender-based violence (GBV) prevention to help participants lead locally relevant, justice-driven climate solutions.

“The four countries around Lake Chad have suffered the ripple effects of climate change, including displacement, hunger, violence, and inequality,” Oho said.

Fellows will also receive seed funding to implement community projects tailored to their unique environments.

“This isn’t a quick fix or a training programme for the sake of it. We’re building long-term power here,” she said.

“We are building the capacity of young climate activists to address the nexus between climate change and insecurity and climate change and gender-based violence.

“We are empowering the fellows to design and implement community-based action projects.

“We believe the solutions already exist within the communities. What’s missing is support, visibility, and trust.”

The fellowship has five objectives: enhancing advocacy through storytelling and data, tackling the nexus between climate change, GBV, and insecurity, supporting grassroots innovations, building a regional activist network, and promoting decolonised climate narratives.

She emphasised the importance of empowering local voices to shift how the world understands and responds to the Lake Chad crisis.

“Our people are not voiceless. They’ve just been unheard,” she added.

She noted that the story of Lake Chad has been told by other people for too long, adding that the fellowship will provide platforms for people of the region to tell their own stories themselves.

Semiye Michael, the executive director of DEAN Initiative, said “our stories are told on our behalf,” which according to him is due to the “lack of tools curate our own stories by ourselves”.

“Our data our collected on our behalf, they are interpreted on our behalf and whatever they make out of those stories becomes our realities,” Michael said.

“But with this fellowship, we are hoping that we export these young people to attend global conferences and rebuke the narratives. These young people will be able to tell the truth of our reality.

“The young people that would participate in this fellowship would have access to funding; grants that will be up to $2000 in real time to curate community level solutions within their immediate environment.

“And they would also have the opportunity to have all expense paid travel to share some of these fragile stories across the world.”