The third Women’s Climate Assembly (WCA) that is set to take place in Saly, Senegal, from October 7 to 11, 2024, will bring together over 120 women activists and community leaders from 12 countries across West and Central Africa to tackle the urgent climate crisis affecting the African continent. It is themed: “African women stand together to defend our land, waters and forests!”

The 2024 Women’s Climate Assembly aims to strengthen and unify women-led struggles to stop dirty extractives and false solutions to the climate crisis in West and Central Africa and to propose development solutions that centre and support women, their families and their communities to enjoy a decent life and livelihoods in a time of a deepening climate crisis. With the threats facing the Congo Basin and the Amazon, this year’s WCA will be an especially critical organising space for African women and communities ahead of COP29 to be held in Azerbaijan in November 2024.

“We are asking for them to change the system. We cannot live in this climate – everywhere is hot, there is a lot of sickness, we can no longer survive. Our plants are dying, our animals are dying. Our sea level is rising, creating coastal erosion, and taking away our houses. We need to change things and tell them, leave our climate alone!” says Oumou Koulibaly of Senegal.

Africa is said to be living the climate crisis now, with the continent being hit by heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, drying soils, cyclones, storms, locust plagues, flooding, coastal erosion, rising sea levels and other climate-related catastrophes.

Since 2000, Mozambique, Madagascar, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Kenya have been among the hardest-hit countries in the world, even though their emissions are minimal. 2024 has been the hottest on record. The temperature across Africa is projected to be hotter than previously experienced in the recorded past and will rise faster than the global average across most of the continent.

The climate crisis has severe consequences for the African continent, its ecosystems and its peoples, and the frustrating irony is that Africa is grappling with the most impacts of global heating but has contributed the least.

“Women in Africa, who are often the primary caregivers and responsible for securing food and water for their families, face the brunt of climate impacts. Despite these challenges, African women have been at the forefront of critical and resilient responses to the climate crisis. They play a pivotal role in sustainable agriculture, community leadership, and biodiversity protection.

“However, their visibility and voices are too often underrepresented in national and international climate policy discussions. This is exemplified by the continued failure of the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Conference of Parties (COPs) to progress real solutions to the climate crisis even as the world burns,” according to the organisers.

“We need to talk to the polluters for the problems they are causing in our communities. Everywhere you turn, there are problems. After maybe six to seven years, you’ll hear about equity, but we are still here.

“We need to wake up and do something as women! When we sit there, they will talk over us. We need to wake up and do something that will bring justice to us,” says Abie Freeman of Liberia.

“The COP negotiations continue to be co-opted and undermined by transnational corporations and their government allies, stymying efforts to ensure that nations that bear historical responsibility for causing and exacerbating the climate crisis commit to urgent action – deeper carbon cuts and full provision for the loss and damage they have caused to peoples around the world who carry the most significant costs of climate heating.”

Last year, the Women’s Climate Assembly produced a declaration, outlining demands for climate justice, reparations and sovereignty for Africa from consultations in over seventy communities across the continent.

They asserted their Right to Say NO to the destruction of their lands and forests, oceans and rivers by so-called “development” projects that harm their ways of life and livelihoods. They also called on polluters to pay meaningful reparations informed by impacted communities for historical and ongoing climate and ecological debt owed to Africa.