Th Rejoice Africa Foundation is partnering with the Fair Start Movement to promote a joint project entitled The Seeds for the Future campaign.
Read more at Robert Mwesigye’s post – written on site in Uganda – here.
Climate change is devastating the Global South.
The idea is simple: Investments will go directly to women and their families in order to plant trees, expand kitchen gardens, and open saving accounts for their children – all at the same time. This mitigates the climate crisis, ensures food security and supplemental income, and moves towards equality of opportunity for children.
Esther Afolaranmi is a young lawyer from Nigeria who will come to the U.S. to ask for these ecocentric, climate restorative and family planning-based climate reparations – as described more below.
This has the greatest impact, long-run, on regenerative development. See our research below.
Fair Start’s recent grant to Rejoice to support it was not given as charity or altruism – though some may choose to do it that way too.
This is done as part of loss and damage climate reparations, mandated by human rights regimes, per this complaint pending before the United Nations Human Rights Council. That complaint is consistent with ecocentric approaches to family and environmental law, and efforts to reform the two areas, here in the United States.
The complaint calls on the United Nations to honor its obligation to ensure all children are born and raised in conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, which functionally requires climate restoration via birth equity family planning entitlements.
All children have a right to an ecososocial fair start in life as the first and overriding human right, defined as climate restoration and birth equity, and we can take the resources that were stolen from future generations to fund that start by all means effective.
This process, of baseline compensation, requires taking back wealth from those people and companies that imposed their costs on others by not ensuring birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Convention.
What does this mean exactly? Wealth today was created by externalizing the ecosocial costs of choosing the Cairo convention model of private families, over the fair and ecocentric model of wealth being contingent on ensuring that all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Children’s Convention, including historic climatological conditions. The world is in crisis today because we never paid those costs.
We owe future generations the difference, and you can test who is doing this and who is not – who is fundamentally just versus unjust – based on their position on the United Nations complaint above and these reparations. Fair Start has given a chunk of our annual budget as what we owe. Given that Exxon knew about the climate crisis and exacerbated it, they owe much more, and regardless of what the governments that colluded say and do to shield them.
Esther Afolaranmi is a young lawyer from Nigeria who will come to the U.S. to ask for these ecocentric, climate restorative and family planning-based climate reparations. She is a grand threat to those blocking family reforms that would have prevented things like the death of this child, and the mass death the climate crisis is bringing to many colonized nations. Campaigns like Esther’s seek to create a kink in the arc of ecocidal growth that would save more animals and children, and prevent more climate emissions – by far – than any organization is succeeding in doing today and she is doing so as part of a legal process of forcing the United Nations to actually uphold human rights, like the first and overriding human right to an ecosocial fair start in life.
TAKE ACTION: Donate directly to RAFUG for the Seeds for the Future campaign today, not as charity, but as fairness and reparations that bend the arc of who we are towards justice. The donations, through Wise or their bank account, go directly to RAFUG (which was recently inspected onsite and certified by the Republic of Uganda) and the families, whereas most international giving to programs in Uganda goes to charities in the Global North that take a percentage of the funds.
And if an organization or individual doing public interest you back will not sign this letter to the United Nations simply asking for the Secretary General to say all kids deserve a fair start in life contact us at Ashley@FairStartMvement.org and we will work with attorneys to asses how refusal to ensure basic fairness undercut any claims they have made, including in fundraising.
Bibliography:
https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/activity-database/continuous-planting-of-trees
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0034644619885321
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_bonds
https://basicincome.org/news/2020/11/why-universal-basic-income-is-important-in-africa/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/girls-school-africa-developing-nations-gdp