Christina Kwauk: Read the transcript

Linda Jackson: Good afternoon. I'm Linda Jackson. I'm the president and founder of the Association for Community Empowerment Solutions, ACESWorld, and on behalf of our team I would like to welcome you to the first in a series of conversations about girls education. ACESWorld works to support girls in: Colombia, Uganda, Ghana and Haiti. We work toward gender equality and supporting women and girls to achieve their full potential. We also founded the Gender Equality Data Collaborative, GEDC, to assist member NGOs with data collection, monitoring, and evaluation. If you have any questions during our conversation, please feel free to place those in the chat.

We are pleased to host this conversation with Christina Kwauk, Non-Resident Fellow, Global Economy Development Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C.. Christina is a social scientist with a current interdisciplinary focus on education and climate action. She's an expert in girls' education in developing countries, 21st-century skills and youth empowerment, sports for development, and the intersection of gender, education, and climate change. Christina is the author of a recent blog published by Brookings, “Why is Girls’ Education Important for Climate Action.” Thank you so much for joining us today, Christina. 

Christina Kwauk: Thank you for having me today. 

Linda: So, I’d like to begin by asking you the question that was posted in your article: why is girls education important for climate action, specifically in low and middle income countries?

Christina: Well, I think it's very clear today that climate change has a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable around the world and oftentimes when we're looking at low and middle income countries the most vulnerable happen to be girls and women. So we know that climate change has a disproportionately negative impact on them whether that means, for example, girls and women have to spend [a] longer time trying to find water sources. It might mean that in cases of drought-induced famine that household income and livelihoods are affected, so that households have to make decisions to you know really try to help their families survive and sometimes that means needing to find a way you know to offload a mouth to feed. And sometimes that means if a dowry from marrying off  a girl early means more income for them, that's a really hard choice that some families have to make and it has long-term life altering consequences for girls and the list goes on.

You know in terms of their education being disrupted, their transition into womanhood being rapidly quickened, and they're beginning childbearing starting much earlier. So we know that climate change has this kind of an impact on girls and women, but at the same time you know we also understand that an investment in girls education is a powerful investment. Its ripple effects extend beyond the girl herself and are felt in: her family, her future family-if she so chooses to have one-, her community, her country. Right? We understand that it has great impacts not only on her ability to be more economically empowered but also to achieve greater health outcomes for herself and her and her future family as well.

So we understand that. But we don't look too much at the research or the emerging evidence around why an investment in girls education is actually good in our efforts to address climate change. Research shows that there are three really powerful ways that an investment in girls education does address climate change and that's first empowering her. Empowering her to take greater control over her own reproductive life. Understand the concepts of whether that's family planning or understand you have access to comprehensive sexuality education or puberty education. So that's one area that is  girls empowerment there.

A second area is that girl’s formal education is a fundamental requirement and a necessity to really enable her to take on leadership positions in the future. Whether it's formal leadership positions, political leadership positions. And those political decision-making powers once in the hands of women have very important environmental consequences. Countries with greater representation of women in parliament, for example, have lower carbon footprints. They have stricter climate strategies. They have passed international environmental treaties. They have really great environmental outcomes. We don't see girls or women in leadership unless you know they have had a chance to have an education.

And a third reason is skills. An investment in girls’ education is the direct pathway to developing critical green skills for a green economy. If we want to see more women driving innovation and leading a transition into a green economy we need to ensure that she has the skills needed by these kinds of jobs or else we're going to see girls and women at the fringes of the green economy just as they have been in our present fossil fuel driven economy. 

Linda: Well, thank you Christina. That was a great answer. So in a companion report you wrote earlier this year, “A New Green Learning Agenda Approaches to Quality Education for Climate Action,” you developed a green skills framework which you mentioned in your previous response. How can organizations include climate leadership in their programs and help girls to build their transformative capacity?

Christina: I think oftentimes when we think about green skills we typically think about technical skills. We think about wind turbine technicians or we think about solar power installers, but the thing with green skills and this new framework is really encouraging leaders to expand their conceptualization of green skills beyond the specific capacities and to also think about the generic capacities and the transformative capacities. And that's where organizations beyond your technical and vocational education training organizations step in.

It's really thinking about this: how do we address the generic capacities of leadership to negotiate critical thinking problems and solve these sorts of generic breadth of skills capacities that are really critical for really enabling people to see with sort of green-tinted lenses. To see the world through a greener perspective and to behave in ways that are greener. And so that's that's critical for sort of orienting our approach to skills development. To really think about how we align skills to sustainability into climate action.

And then when we get into the transformative capacities. That's really where some of these leadership pieces: collective action, political agency, negotiating power, recognizing dynamics of power [come into play]. And really getting into some of these critical transformative skills are really important for organizations that are working on life skills, for example. It's really about making that connection beyond how we currently conceptualize green skills to really thinking about how a broader breadth of skills are critical for increasing the adaptive capacity of individuals and the climate resilience of individuals as well. So I think there's many ways to align green skills to the work that presently organizations are focusing on. 

Linda: Thank you. And I think you're absolutely right in that as we've begun to develop a new program, we've looked at this intersection of vocational skills, of life skills, and of green skills. And there's certainly a tremendous amount of intersection and overlap there. So ACESWorld’s GEDC works with many NGOs in low and middle income countries. How can they best communicate the urgency to invest in girls' education to combat this climate crisis that we're facing? And I think I'm framing that question kind of with the backdrop that we already know so much about the importance of girls' education and that even that hasn't really been able to significantly move the needle.

Christina: I think when it comes to organizations that are working on climate action, perhaps the drawback and sort of the, I guess, benefit is that you know these organizations are often really focused on greenhouse gas numbers. They're focused on carbon reduction. Even when you look at climate financing. Climate financing goes really to those interventions that, at least in terms of research modeling and research outputs, demonstrate a deep impact on our ability to reduce carbon emissions. That’s good in terms of really helping to focus attention and to focus dollars.

But it also has a drawback in that it doesn't allow us to really attend to those sociological innovations that are harder to measure direct carbon impact, and that's really where education comes in and especially girls' education. So I think one of the things is to try to draw on what existing evidence there is around the carbon impact of education investments. Project Drawdown, for example, has modeled the carbon impact of an investment in girls education and family planning together. And has listed that in their current projections or the current modeling as a number two solution, right after reducing food waste. And that together if girls education and family planning were invested broadly around the world that we could potentially reduce carbon reductions by about 85 gigatons by 2050.

But then there's also emerging research that [addresses] quality education. Because the Project Drawdown model is looking really at access. Access to education and access to family planning. But if we want to understand the quality of education, we have emerging studies that show that there is a carbon impact there that we can potentially track. One study, for example, showed that a climate education that really helped to connect students and learners to climate solutions increased their personal agency, their climate empowerment had very consequential and measurable effects on their behaviors, their lifestyle decisions, and so on. [It showed] that an investment in this kind of education could potentially reduce 20 gigatons of carbon, and that was just estimating 16 percent of secondary school students in upper middle and high income countries. So imagine if that kind of an education were reached to all of the children and youth and adults around the world. That could be game-changing in terms of the carbon reductions.

So I think it's speaking to organizations to really look at girls education and education itself as a strong driver in climate action. Part of it is that we need more research to help us understand what is the carbon impact but I think beyond that it's also trying to really understand what is the cost of inaction. 

Linda: Okay thank you. So you touched on this a bit in this question, but a quality education that includes attention to issues of gender and power can be an effective pathway to empowering girls with control over their own bodies. Can you talk a little bit more about that connection?

Christina: So this particular point draws on research within the sexuality and reproductive health education area and shows that you could increase girls knowledge about contraception, family planning, and intimate partner violence, but in order to really see a long-lasting impact it's really incorporating a discussion and critical thinking around issues of gender and issues of power dynamics. When combine knowledge about contraception, knowledge about family planning, with issues of gender and power, that really gets at how we shift our interpersonal relations, how we shift gender inequality, and gender unequal beliefs, and values and practices. That together has much more impact on the ability for girls and women to be able to actually act on their knowledge. I think it's sort of that “no do” gap and it seems that by attending to issues of gender and power we're able to bridge some of that gap a little bit.

Linda: Okay thank you. So how do you think the environmental movement and organizations working for girls education and gender equality can form a more synergistic relationship to achieve the goals of educating girls to become climate activists?

Christina: The existing research, at least in the environment side, that connects to issues of gender equality really comes from the population health and environment community. [Some] organizations are focused on conservation efforts and linking that to population issues and seeing the importance of not only educated women but women who also have access to family planning. We already see that there are some inklings of connection and synergy, but I think what needs to happen a little bit more is to go beyond just addressing the education and family planning but really thinking about starting much earlier when girls are girls. Because these ideas and these practices and these beliefs and these worldviews are formulated at a much earlier time and if we're only sort of addressing women in some way where it's a band-aid solution, it's addressing things too late…it's not taking into account years of accumulated psychological impact of being denied their rights and denied their education.

So I think on the environment side, on the climate side, it's really trying to make those connections. That it's not just the inclusion of women that's needed in the work that they do and that would then allow them to achieve their goals, but it's really thinking about [how] these are deeply embedded gender norms and gender practices that need to be addressed much earlier on to really transform systems.

Linda: This will unfortunately be our last question. Many small NGOs struggle to identify funding for more comprehensive girls’ education programs. What do you see as the role of the philanthropic community to promote skills for green jobs?

Christina: The philanthropic community definitely needs to be brought into this space for sure. They hold the purse to a lot of our ability to achieve gender equality and climate action. I think the challenge, though, is that when you look at climate financing, this is especially the case is that donor organizations and donor governments have very siloed budgets when it comes to what they are actually investing in. And, unfortunately, climate change is not something that you can just silo into technological innovation or into the transportation sector or into the energy sector. It's cross-cutting, cross-sectoral issue. And so I think philanthropy and donors really need to understand that by siloing our efforts and siloing their investments, they're not as impactful as compared to when they solve for multiple issues.

I think it's really being able to speak at these intersections and speaking about the importance of crosstalk that will hopefully help at least create some funds within their budget lines that are focused on cross-sectoral action.

Linda: Okay thank you. So I know that this is one of the issues that we've struggled with as we've tried to create more comprehensive projects, that funding for comprehensive projects seems to be a lot more limited. I want to really thank you for the time that you've given us and everything that you've shared with us. It has been quite insightful and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to you sometime again in the near future. Thank you very much, Christina!

Christina: It’s been my pleasure! Take care, everyone.