I was invited by The Economist to speak on a panel at the Inaugural Sustainability Week Africa event, on a panel on “equipping young Africans to prioritise sustainability.”
My point: The Green Industrial Revolution needs human capital. Millions of jobs will be produced by this revolution, and young Africa will also need to be at the top of the human capital pyramid of green skills, rather than just doing the equivalent of sweeping the factory floor of the new climate economy. 8B finances African students to attend global universities, including those studying climate-related STEM degrees, so that they can bring the African lived experiences in the rooms crafting informed solutions, whether in research, industry, or business.
Consider this. In 2022, a leading global organization in climate research was looking to hire an energy systems modeler with a PhD in energy systems, an understanding of the power sector, and preferably, with a lived experience of the African continent. They spent 6 months actively searching to fill the role and could not find such a person. They ended up hiring a perfectly competent European candidate to fill the role. In an age where so much climate activity will revolve around Africa, this is unacceptable.
Yet it should not be surprising: according to one study, less than 4% of global funding for climate change research over the past 30 years has been spent on African topics, and the vast majority of the funding goes to institutions in Europe, Canada, and the US, even if African countries are deeply vulnerable to the effects of climate change. According to another report, a recent Reuters Hot List of 1000 climate scientists included only 5 Africans. As a result, the African footprint in all the places where innovations to address the climate crisis are taking place is small or absent.
That has two consequences: one on the loss of innovation and one on the adequacy of solutions.
First, the best solution to the alternatives to the plastics problem may well be in the mind of a young Kenyan chemist who is currently in a local, under-resourced university. The world is therefore missing out on a significant contribution of the human lived experiences into the climate solutions ecosystem, which limits the range of innovations possible. This is a loss to everyone.
Second, in the spirit of the mantra that has animated my previous activism in HIV/AIDS, where for all under-represented groups, there should be “nothing about us without us,” the responses crafted in support of the continent are currently stewarded by people largely without the African lived experience, assuming that technical solutions will have the same outcome in all social, economic, or political contexts. This flattening out of the African context has come at a huge cost in the form of unmet targets in the economic development agenda over the last 75 years, and we see the same blind spots emerging in climate. But in climate, we do not have time to waste. Creating a critical mass of African leaders who can participate, innovate, and compete as equals in the new climate economy is a necessary solution (though, of course, not sufficient!) to this problem.
