Episode 06: Gender & Climate Justice - Ndivile Mokoena
Inside the Episode - During our time together, we spoke about:
Ndivile’s experience growing up in Soweto, South Africa and discovering her passion for social justice.
Her work with Gender CC South Africa and why we need women at the table for climate decision making!
Capacity Building: Beyond being the newest COP26 buzzword, what does this concept mean and how does GenderCC apply this in their communities?
The role of NGOs in bridging the gap between governments and local communities, and how important that is especially in countries like South Africa where that relationship is historically complex and still very painful.
It was really tough to boil down this conversation with Ndivile Mokoena into a bite-size case study… for all the right reasons. Re-listening to our interview, I found myself trying to write out everything that Ndivile said because it all deserves to be highlighted. I hope you’ll take the time to listen to her story and support her work.
Inside the Episode - During our time together, we spoke about:
Ndivile’s experience growing up in Soweto, South Africa and discovering her passion for social justice.
Her work with Gender CC South Africa and why we need women at the table for climate decision making!
Capacity Building: Beyond being the newest COP26 buzzword, what does this concept mean and how does GenderCC apply this in their communities?
The role of NGOs in bridging the gap between governments and local communities, and how important that is especially in countries like South Africa where that relationship is historically complex and still very painful.
Intro
Ndivile grew up in Soweto, South Africa with 5 siblings and parents who worked hard to provide a comfortable life. Early in her young adulthood, once her parents retired, she sacrificed her own education and got a job out of necessity to support her siblings as they were growing up.
While she was doing well in her job and growing successful, she knew that she wasn’t quite working on her true passion - social sciences and justice. So as she got to this moment and stage of life, she took action. She started volunteering in community development work with youth and women while becoming a counselor to support different orphanages and women’s health organizations. A ‘burning desire’ emerged, she told me. ‘This is where I belong, this is who I am.’ It’s hard to make the jump from comfort to passion, I really admire this about Ndivile.
From there, a friend from church put her in touch with a ministry group called Justice and Peace - working on environmental justice, gender justice, land rights, and good governance practices. Among many lessons learned from her work with J&P, they were heavily focused on developing social analyses to assess needs of communities, ‘There is no point in going and implementing something in a community if the community themselves doesn’t relate to it. The project is going to fail, it won’t be successful.’ An important reminder, reminiscent of the message from Forget, this work became a launchpad for her future work with GenderCC and the rest is history!
In our conversation, we touched on a lot of amazing frameworks, use cases, and imagined new ways forward, but I’ll just touch on a few concepts here with some background on her organization first.
GenderCC is an NGO based in Berlin with a chapter in Johannesburg and doing great work across southern Africa. They are focused on work at the intersection of climate justice and gender justice, approaching this by attempting to bridge the gap between government and local communities.
Ndivile categorizes their work as advocacy - in her words, ‘advocating for the integration of gender into climate change policy, capacity building for communities, for government officials, and raising awareness at the nexus of gender and climate change.’ Their work stands up for women and non-binary folks as they are consistently brushed aside during global and local climate conversations.
There’s a lot packed into that, so we dug a bit deeper…
Capacity-building
Everyone at COP26 was talking about ‘Capacity-Building’ when it comes to helping communities better prepare for and adapt to local climate change effects. But somehow I left the conference unclear on what that actually meant.
For Ndivile, it goes something like this: ‘As much as communities are able to identify the challenges they’re facing, they don't always know what to do, where to go, and what it is that is happening around them. Where does it come from, how do they relate to it, and how do they stop it?’
So the goal of GenderCC is to ‘empower these people with knowledge, information and resources when necessary.’ They help communities to identify the challenges, relate them to their social settings, and also tap into their traditional knowledge.
Engaging existing indigenous practices is a huge priority for them: ‘When it comes to climate change and environmental issues, we know how our forefathers took care of our environment. Some of their knowledge, they gave to the next generations, especially when it comes to farming, preserving food, how we value the environment [in our culture], how we relate to nature, so we needed to tap into that knowledge.’
As Ndivile reminds us, ‘before all of this technology/civilization was there, people survived with clean, pure water, eating well. We don’t need to come up with solutions for them, so rather we ask, ‘it seems you have this problem in your area, how do you think it can be sorted?’
Ndivile was kind enough to walk us through their process for community engagement, too.
GenderCC Process for Community Engagement:
When GenderCC would start from square one with work in a new community, they researched: Which civil society orgs are working there? Then asked them to explain the local dynamics and make introductions to community leaders, trying to map how who knows about what?
Once community leaders are identified, they would them ask questions about challenges in the community from their own experience, not assuming the answer.
Then, explain the initiative.
Ask: is this something that can help them? Does this align with the actual needs and priorities?
You do not just impose your program, you build trust and deliver on your promises.
If there seems to be some benefit to working together, GenderCC asks community leaders to talk to the communities themselves and advocate alongside them.
Explain how they are going to benefit and how GenderCC hopes to make a difference.
For Ndivile, the key is that the community has to be empowered to be ‘self-sufficient and own the project. After you leave, they have to be able to run with it and apply their own innovations. Otherwise, you will leave them in a worse situation than where they started.’
Gender/Climate Use Case - Water:
As an example of how GenderCC engages with communities specifically at the nexus of gender and climate, she told me about a ‘Water Use’ workshop, which included both men and women in a partner community.
They asked the men a simple question: What do you use water for over the course of the day? ‘Bathing, drinking, maybe watering the garden,’ this was the extent of the answers they got.
When the women answered, even men in their own families were amazed by how many more uses the women had for water, to benefit not only themselves but their family and community as a whole.
For GenderCC, exercises like these are essential for communities to realize that women must be involved in decision making for all things with regard to water processes… why would you exclude from planning the group who uses water more than anyone else? The thesis is clear: Women are working with water every day, they can come up with better solutions. This also applies beyond water to things like energy, food and many other areas of life.
On top of that, women across the world are usually still expected to perform care work. This is unrecognized by the economy as ‘informal’ rather than ‘formal’ work and is therefore both unpaid and under-recognized in the context of policy planning. For Ndivile, policies need to be wholly inclusive to all segments of society and involve those who know the most!
GenderCC’s hope is that by highlighting specific intersectional examples to governments, like a woman ‘fetching water or firewood with babies on their back,’ this will create more awareness of the necessity for inclusion in climate conversations.
The Role of an NGO
For Ndivile, the role of an NGO is to bridge government and communities together. They offer some resources to governments to help them go about this in the right way when they are considering offering a new program or solution.
Example :
Advise gov to do a ‘community stakeholder consultation’ - usually at these meetings, there are scientists and academics, but no community leaders.
Use community avenues to communicate time and place of a public hearing and gather feedback on the idea - local radios and newspapers rather than international new outlets.
Use simple and native language - remove scientific jargon and ensure the community can understand. In South Africa, oftentimes the gov will require English, which decreases engagement.
Have a workshop with the community before a public hearing to inform them on how the process will work for this … encourage them to talk from the heart, tell their story. Use their native tongue.
Beware ‘Conditional Funding’
GenderCC is fortunate because funders are focused on supporting the work they are doing over anything else. But they have witnessed the negative experiences of other organizations who take the wrong money….
One example: A community based organization is known for organizing community activities, protests, and raising awareness towards corporations aiming to extract resources from local communities...
Then, not-so-surprisingly, that corporation decided they wanted to sponsor that community based organization. Because they need money, the organization accepts. However, they are then in the pocket of the corporation. GenderCC stresses that all NGOs need to be focused on the goal first… taking money from that extractor is a conflict of interest. ‘As civil society, under no circumstances do we have to take such money because it’s dirty money and if we take that money, it means we cannot talk against what they are doing, we cannot oppose what they are doing.’
History of Racial and Gender-based violence:
The relationship between government and communities is even more complex in a country like South Africa. As Ndivile told me, ‘[Apartheid] was not long ago, and the damage is still in our minds, it is not gone. It might not be that visible but it is still there.’
That’s why their work is incredibly important now and as we envision a new future world system. I will look to Ndivile’s leadership example as a guidepost along that road.
‘I think we have paved the way, the foundation has been built, and we just need to bring onboard generations to come to learn the ropes. We’ll be mentoring and pushing hard because we still have a long way to go.’
Contact:
To learn more about Ndivile and how you can contribute to the work at GenderCC, visit their website GenderCC.org.za … to contribute in many forms.
