Reframing climate messaging for mobilising youth in Cape Town

Cape Town youth face high unemployment, low service delivery and challenges of poverty and violence and so often have little opportunity to relate to the need for urgent climate action. Additionally, the language of climate change is often exclusionary, disconnected to the global south and coupled to the view of the crisis being a “white environmental issue”. Talking about rising sea levels seems disconnected from youth in an informal settlement, facing socio-economic challenges.

Afrocentric Climate Culture is a group of young Africans coming together to investigate, unpack and co-create Afrocentric knowledge through the climate justice lens. The aim is to capacitate people with information that will help with climate action. Unpacking and investigating this information will help people to take climate action with the aid of Afrocentric knowledge and systems.

 This project explored transformative learning in the context of reframing climate messaging, making information applicable and relevant as to inspire urgent action. We defined transformative learning in this context as questioning and revising climate knowledge that we have taken for granted to date. We felt that transformative learning could help us with information building and mobilising Cape Town youth to partake in global climate action.

The key contributions of this project include:

(i) stressing the urgency of integrating agency and African identity into climate knowledge development and delivery;

(ii) using intersectional insights as a way to increase relevance for people;

(iii) making the most out of intergenerational opportunities in the process;

(iv) delivering relatable and accessible materials, which can take a range of forms (storytelling, art, podcasts, guidance documents) and can be delivered through a range of mediums (audio, visual, written).

The latter allows the transformative learning process to  be operationalised through transgressive learning. 

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