By Dahabo Abdi Ibrahim
Executive Summary:
Education promotes both individual and national development by contributing to increased productivity and a hope for the eradication of poverty, disease, and ignorance (Kigotho et al. 2016). Author, with a lived experience of displacement, offers an exploration of environmental education and women’s rights, seeking to better understand how women refugees in the Dadaab camp are disproportionately impacted by environmental and climate changes that are of both local and global origins. Paper brings attention to marginalized women’s voices, including her own, and the distinctive and valuable insights that these perspectives can offer about the gaps and faults in our current environmental and educational systems, policies, and practices.
The four female refugees at the center of this study carry the burden of global and environmental changes, despite being the least responsible for this degradation. Their plight has been inflicted by others around them, both in terms of their displacement and the environmental conditions they exist in. Profound gender inequality exists in roles that women are forced to fill, specifically when they are relegated to living in the shadow of their male counterparts. The impacts of this disparity are widespread, preventing women from accessing environmental resources, being included decision-making spaces, and contributing to solutions to environmental declines.
The research paper focuses on decision-making and action plans. A group of girls and women educators explored ways to promote women’s rights and climate justice in elementary and secondary schools and developed plans to promote women’s rights and climate justice in schools.
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