African Climate Reparations Collective

The Collective was born out of the Wakati Wetu Festival (external link), held in Nairobi in October 2025 - a landmark gathering that celebrates the shift of the reparations movement entering a new phase of strategy, solidarity, and unstoppable momentum. The festival brought together activists, researchers, legal experts, and organizers committed to reimagining a repaired and just future for the continent. During the festival, AfaLab convened a dedicated roundtable on Climate Justice and Reparations (external link) bringing together leading African voices across law, policy, grassroots organizing, and research on this important topic. This conversation marked a turning point. Participants collectively recognized that advancing climate reparations on the continent requires more than isolated interventions or one-off convenings. It demands a sustained, coordinated, and strategic space. From this shared commitment, the African Climate Reparations Collective emerged.   

Africa is among the regions that have contributed least to the climate crisis, yet it faces some of its most severe human, economic, and environmental consequences. At the same time, African actors remain structurally marginalized within many of the political and institutional spaces where responses to the crisis are shaped. 

Despite growing mobilization for climate justice, climate reparations advocacy across Africa remains fragmented, under-resourced, and often sidelined in global policy spaces. At the same time, global climate governance continues to reproduce colonial and extractive dynamics through debt-based finance, carbon markets, and technocratic approaches that obscure historical responsibility and sideline structural repair. Important political and legal openings are emerging-from loss and damage frameworks to advisory  opinions from international and regional courts, and on the political level the African Union's decade on reparations and the UN General Assembly resolution on slavery (external link).

The Collective exists to ensure that these opportunities are not missed, diluted, or captured, but shaped and driven by African priorities. 

The African Climate Reparations Collective works to move climate reparations from the margins to the center of African climate politics. It does so by:

• Coordinating for impact by strengthening coordinated African civil society advocacy and engagement on climate reparations across continental, subregional, and global policy spaces.
• Forging African-led strategies by developing shared political, legal, and policy strategies rooted in African realities.
• Strengthening the evidence base by consolidating evidence, tools, and narratives that support reparative claims.
• Reclaiming the narrative by shifting climate policy debates from false solutions and technocratic fixes to responsibility, repair, and power. 

The Collective operates as an integrated space, bringing together advocacy, research, policy engagement, and movement building.

It is grounded in a set of core principles:

Accountability over charity: climate reparations are about historical responsibility and obligation not aid.

Structural transformation: addressing root causes of harm, including systems of extraction and inequality.

African-led leadership: priorities and strategies defined by African actors and communities.

Intersectional justice: centering those most impacted, including women, youth, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and frontline communities.

Grounded knowledge: linking research to lived realities and concrete policy change.

Non-extractive collaboration: ensuring partnerships respect and strengthen African agency.  

1. Advocacy and Policy Engagement

We coordinate joint advocacy, develop shared positions, and engage with African governments, regional institutions, and global processes to advance climate reparations.

2. Research and Knowledge Infrastructure

We produce and curate African-led research, case studies, and legal analysis grounded in lived experience.

3. Strategic Foresight and Resourcing

We track political, legal, and funding developments related to climate reparations, identify opportunities and risks, and coordinate approaches to resource mobilization. 

The African Climate Reparations Collective operates through a non-hierarchical structure, with founding members leading key areas of work.