Across the African continent, major “green” development projects such as hydrogen corridors, mega-solar complexes, wind farms, biofuel schemes, carbon offset plantations, and mining for transition minerals are reshaping land, livelihoods, ecosystems and political power. They are framed as climate solutions and sustainable development opportunities but often reproduce the political and economic logics of earlier colonial regimes: extraction without consent, racialized dispossession, land grabs, gendered harms and environmental degradation. These schemes can be characterised as neocolonial in that they often serve to secure continued wealth accumulation in the global North while enabling major corporate actors to evade responsibility for the harms they generate, where vulnerable and indigenous communities are at the forefront
African women and girls absorb a disproportionate share of these impacts: They suffer loss of communal or individually farmed land; bear increased unpaid care burdens; heightened exposure to labour exploitation and multiform gender-based violence around extractive sites; exclusion from decision-making, compensation processes, and other benefit-sharing mechanisms; erosion of food systems that women sustain; policing, surveillance, and restricted mobility (environmental defenders) linked to “strategic” green projects.
These harms sit at the intersection of colonial histories and legacies, contemporary economic restructuring, and climate crisis politics.
To advance and ground our advocacy on climate justice and reparations for Africa, this initiative seeks case studies that document the colonial heritage and contemporary legacies shaping climate justice struggles in African countries. These may take the form of:
- historical and genealogical analyses (e.g. to trace the colonial legacy of laws, customs, practices, and patterns). Please note, we are looking for concrete case studies, not theoretical works);
- community-specific investigations (e.g. community-driven studies emerging from grassroots organizing; case studies that document the lived realities of African women within these new “green” frontiers); or
- comparative studies and mapping analyses (e.g., Pan-African, regional, or cross-border studies mapping communities, CSOs, and states that have made or are making concrete demands for reparative climate justice.)