The Shared Vision of Sustainability and Peacebuilding | Community Call Notes 5.4.2022
It takes experiencing something at the personal level and then you decide to make a change and be an agent of that change for the whole community.
-Caroline Odera
Our May Community Call focused on The Shared Vision of Sustainability and Peacebuilding. We hosted an insightful conversation with Patrick Arnold, Ismail Munyamu, and Caroline Odera. We explored the intersection of environmental issues and peacebuilding and how each of us has a role to play as agents of change.
For those of you unable to attend, we're happy to share the call recording.
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Excerpts from our conversation:
Patrick [ 00:09:45] - We brought two voices from the 10 Billion Strong community - Ismail Munyamu Uganda Co-director of Youth Link Networks and Caroline Odera founder of Wise Kenya. At 10 Billion Strong, as an environmental leadership organization we are really grounded in community. But first, more about where I came from and tie in my strong passion for environmental issues and conflict resolution and peacebuildling.
I grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the oldest fishing port in the United States known for endless amounts of fish that could be caught and shipped all across the world. Fast forward a few decades to when I was born in the early 1980s. The water was polluted, the fishing grounds were depleted, the population was shrinking, and there was a lot of conflict in the community because of job loss and unemployment and decreased tax revenue. How would this town thrive and bounce back? So I really grew up in an atmosphere of conflict - mismanagement of natural resources and imbalance with humans and their natural environment.
“When we think about humans thriving we also need to think about our ecosystems thriving.” My primary interest in protecting the environment is for the benefits of humans. All of this is personal to me. I came from a fishing family in Gloucester where they brought a new way of fishing - over 100 years ago. This was part of the family legacy. My grandfather ended up not becoming a fisher because of the dangers involved - he ended up becoming a gardener. So my father became a gardener as well. He ended up designing large scale gardens on the east and west coasts.
What I learned growing up on the ocean and amongst floral beauty, a great appreciation for what happens when humans live in balance with nature and when they don’t. All over the world there are a lot of challenges around natural environments that are creating significant human conflict.
At 10 Billion Strong, we’ve built a community of young leaders all across the world who are really focused on building their leadership capacity to effect positive environmental change in their communities. And this is quite hard in communities where people aren’t taught they can be leaders. Leadership is only something for older people, a certain privilege or economic class. We are trying to reframe leadership so they feel they 1/ have a responsibility and 2/ have the qualifications and ability to create change.
What we’re trying to do with young people is start with scaffolding opportunities - early experiences where people can take positive action and get positive reinforcement for it, start with small opportunities and grow into bigger opportunities. Start early, start small, and ground in community.
We spent a year working on our curriculum and offerings . We brought together 20 environmental leaders from 17 countries and created the Green Leaders Academy that focuses on environmental literacy, leadership development, and civic engagement. It was hyper-localized. To grow the network we’ve really focused on networking with local NGOs and social enterprises. The idea is that these groups can use our content and curriculum in their community work for shared outcomes and shared impact.
Start early, start small, and ground in community.
I really want Ismail and Caroline to talk about the work they do, how they are thinking about the intersection of sustainability and peacebuilding.
Ismail [00:22:25] Youth Link Network is an organization that came about to empower young people through sustainable initiatives in order to relieve poverty and hardship. We do this by providing advice and assistance and organizing programs of education.
Away from Youth Link, I’m engaged in other youth-focused work, mediation, and I’m a medical student. So I work to grow a nexus between health, peace & security, and youth empowerment. This gives me the opportunity to interact with people from different backgrounds. I really think about integrated solutions to the problems we have. I have a holistic view for solutions.
Caroline [00:26:40] I’m from Kisumu, Kenya next to the Lake Victoria region. As the founder and director of Wise, I work with women and girls from the Lake Region. This region is comprised of 14 counties; we work in five counties bordering the lake. Similar to Patrick, I grew up in the fishing industry. My mom used to sell fish and my dad used to farm fish. Culturally, women are not allowed to go to the lake to get fish, they can only sell.
By the time I was in high school, this system changed. There were not a lot of fish coming from the lake due to climate changes . There was a lot of demand, but supply was diminishing. As a woman, if you are not educated and don’t have another form of income, your livelihood is now cut off.
Fast forward to when I went to school for business management and IT. So I thought about how I can use my new skills to impact women in my community like my mom. They didn’t go to school, but they need to know how to put food on the table without depending on fish.
Wise works with women and girls in these counties bordering Lake Victoria , helping them to diversify their livelihood. We focus on sustainable enterprises. In this region there is conflict between people and humans and wildlife. The people are encroaching on places where wild animals live - there are stories of hippos killing farmers.
Another problem is the farming practices are not sustainable; they use a lot of chemicals. We promote agri-business and organic farming.
We also focus on the enterprise of eco-tourism. There are a lot of invasive species in the lake that infringe on the farming practices. The hyacinth has covered the lakes which prevents the boats from being able to move. The idea came to create crafts from the hyacinth. So now this is a profitable business.
At Wise, we believe that entrepreneurship is the panacea of the global challenges we encounter. We work on this in a couple of ways:
1/ We work with women and girls to economically empower them. Everything we do around sustainable enterprises.
2/ We do IT for development. You can’t be successful in business without taking your business online.
3/ Lastly, we focus on political, environmental, and civic leadership. We can’t preach to you about sustainable leadership when you don’t know what you are sustaining.
While our focus is women and girls, we do sometimes work with boys because most of the women we work with are married or have boys in their house. So when we empower women to be economic leaders, they must also be leaders in their homes.
Patrick [00:32:34] I wanted now to start the conversation about the connections between the environment and conflict, and I thought I would just pose this question to Caroline and Ishmael to get their contacts from their work. I thought I would just pose this question to Caroline and Ismail.
How do you see these 2 things connected or not connected in the work that your organizations do?
What is the connection between sustainability, environmental issues, and how conflict might happen at the personal level, or even the community level, or the national level?
Ismail - I feel like it’s important to understand what peacebuilding is, what conflict is. Conflict can be internal, something you’re struggling with inside your soul. And then you can take it outside of yourself to a conflict of ideas between two or more people. And then, of course, it can expand into your community or the global level.
Conflicts can have an influence, an impact on the environment and the environment can have an influence on the conflict. I’ll share an example from my country. In the mountainous areas, there is an area that is prone to heavy rain and landslides. In most instances where disasters have been, like a landslide, people lose their homes, their livestock, etc. The government and relief agencies try to come in with solutions. The idea they have is to relocate the people to another part of the country and try to allocate part of the land for them.
With the influx of new people into these communities there is more economic stress due to scarce resources and conflict amongst the people begins. The government steps in and tries to mitigate the conflict, but they do not address the root cause of the conflict which is climate change which has caused the migration of people.
Another example is from the northern part of the country that is pastoral. Due to climate change there is a drought in the region. And if the conditions worsen, as it looks like they are, the pastoral tribes in this region there will continue to feel the strain that forces them to fight for their survival.
Patrick [00:41:56] At 10 Billion Strong we were inspired by the framework of inform - inform about the issues, inspire - give people some inspiration to get excited about, and then transform how to change things for the better. The framework for my questions follows that. So, Caroline, can you inform us a bit from your context.
Caroline - Conflict and environment have a clear intersection. For conflict to happen there must be something to fight over. We are taught that resources are always scarce, so we'll always have conflict.
When you look at the environment I tried to break them down in three ways - 1) natural environment / ecological, 2) social / economic, and 3) political. At Wise we focus on social and economic issues.
Social - One of the prominent issues with women and girls is “sex for fish”. Because of climate change, the fish have become scarce. The conflicts that have arisen have mostly impacted the women. If women need to get fish from the lake, they need to befriend the men. The women are mostly married, so you can see how conflict would arise. So a lot of our work is helping the women with these conflicts.
Economic - We work to empower women in terms of business. Women come with ideas and we help translate it into a business idea, a business model. What we’ve seen happen is a transformation in the households. Because they are empowered with the money, they feel like they have a voice.
Ecological - The community has encroached the wetland areas, marshes. A lot of people are building in these spaces. You must be 100 meters from the lake. People build as close as they came. So when floods come, their homes are washed away. As I mentioned before, we also have a lot of human hippo conflict.
One more way we are trying to help is with ICT (technology). Most of the people we work with are not exposed to computers. We tell them in the future you may not be able to perform a job physically, so we need to offer training in technology, educating about cyber security, cyber bullying, online scams, etc.
Lastly, we look at the issue of political instability which causes conflict. This year Kenya is going to have an election. During election time people get a little concerned about politics in terms of investment. They are scared to invest and do business in the country because of the conflicts that are raised in terms of ethnicity, in terms of power struggles, etc.
I’ll give you an example of a struggle. We share the same lake as my colleague in Uganda. We normally have a struggle between an island known as Migingo, because their government says the fish is theirs, but the water is ours, or vice versa. So this creates conflict in boundaries internationally.
Patrick [00:51:12] My next question is a two part question -
How did each of you move from a person who is sort of aware of the problems to a person who felt some sort of responsibility to address them? There's an interesting moment, that moment of being a recipient of these challenges to an active changemaker. I think it's so relevant to the environment and social issues in peace and conflicts. So maybe walk us through that journey of moving from from A to B.
How can future leaders really think about doing that same thing? How can they address conflict and create the conditions for peace and protect a planet for all of all life that exists? And so think about maybe your leadership going forward and doing that, and maybe offer some ideas and tips for others.
Ismail [00:52:20] I began charity work at age 16 just after my secondary education. My passion for that came from the fact that I was brought up in a society full of conflict from family, to neighbor, to community. That exposure enlisted my ability to want to do something about it. I specifically noticed all the health issues in my area - people experience a lot of malaria. It seemed that there were simple preventative solutions, like sanitation. When I dived deeper, I realized the issues were beyond what I thought- poverty, unemployment, youth not going to school, food insecurity, rapid population growth - all of these right in my community. So all these things started to drive the activities I do. I wanted to be at the core of trying to help my people. And all of this from wanting to help with malaria.
So with all of this background, I’m now trying to work on climate change related issues. I’m looking to create a team, to create team initiatives. We’d like to publish something to hand off to leaders so they know what climate change is.
I feel we really need to dive into actions and practices at the individual level. A lot of times we try to begin big which in most cases is very hard.
Caroline [00:59:41] I was raised in a slum. While my parents were fishing, we stayed in a slum area. We used to cook using a fire hood, and you have lightning using kerosene lamps. Learning about electricity, I thought what does it mean not to have electricity? This was the scenario among the women in my community. It takes experiencing something at the personal level and then you decide to make a change and be an agent of that change for the whole community.
While I was growing up in my community in my slum area, I’m the only one who went to school in that community, and went to a boarding school. The majority of the girls just got married.
It took me going through an experience like, you know, cooking, using the fire hood and getting my source of lightning, using kerosene lamps. I could see my mom work so hard to get food on the table each night.
Because of this experience, I had to transform what I learned in business school to help my people, especially the women. I asked myself, What if I grew up to be a part of the women in my community, how would my life be? It can't be the same because I'm actually born to try and change my community. It has to take an experience at a personal level for you to transition to something that can contribute to the community.
Wise started as Smokeless Homes. The idea was to provide every household with a clean cook top and a solar lamp. As we started working in the community, we realized that there's a lot of issues that women are facing, not just energy alone.
We (Wise) still do green energy enterprises - not actually providing the physical products, but training women to come up with more ideas in terms of business in that line.
For you to transform, to bring up a change, I think you must be able to experience something at a personal level and then be able to transition to something big to help the people in the community.
Ismail [01:03:52] I feel we really need to dive into actions and practices at the individual level. A lot of times we try to begin big which in most cases is very hard. I can provide an example. I want to impact climate change - I need to contact my government or contact Patrick in the US forgetting that the humble beginning could be more feasible and would give a better output for my community. I encourage young people to develop contextual practices. Let’s not have this mentality of thinking big before we have the muscle to dance to the tune of the big ideas. This is a very pertinent issue when it comes to conflict resolution and mediation.
Closing Remarks [01:21:38]
Patrick [01:22:46] sylvia was the second person outside of my wife and family who believed in the vision of 10 Billion Strong. This was critical. So maybe everyone can try to be that person for someone else to believe in their dream and see where it goes!
Ismail [01:23:19] I would just like to emphasize…let’s try to be conscious of the context of all of these global issues. Can we reflect on what could be the implementation of a global issue in my small community, in my family? Are all of these policies really feasible if brought into my family? If the answer is yes, then it will be feasible for all - the community, the country, and the globe as well. Give people the freedom to contextualize all the global issues.
Caroline [01:24:42] Good governance and leadership is what we need to promote. We need to elect leaders who think about peace, think about sustainability, and think about uniting everyone together for an inclusive society.
Offuh [01:25:46] It was such a rich conversation. I have so many good notes to visit again and again. Caroline - you gave us different layers of sustainability from natural resources, to politics, to social and economics. To effect a change you need to have a personal experience to have a transformation.
Thank you so much to our guests! And a reminder to join our next call June 1st! Together we are making the world a better place!