How Climate Education is Being Reimagined across Africa

Across Eastern and Southern Africa, young people are not just learning about climate change – they are shaping how it’s taught.

Ensuring that school children around the world have access to high-quality, inclusive, and relevant teaching and learning experiences that prepare them for the future is becoming increasingly difficult. Climate change is presenting serious barriers to educational achievement, impeding children’s (especially girls’) ability to learn, thrive, and aspire to a brighter future.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that climate shocks – such as heavy rainfall, extreme heat, drought, and landslides – affect learners both directly and indirectly. These events disrupt education by damaging school infrastructure, increasing absenteeism, and impairing concentration and learning outcomes, as cognitive development can be impaired by malnutrition. Taken together, all these climate-related factors keep children out of school.

Synthesis work by Education Development Trust details how poorer and rural learners experience the greatest learning losses during such events, exacerbating existing inequities. A UNICEF report estimates that 40 million children had their education disrupted as a result of climate-related disasters.

The African continent is widely acknowledged as one of the regions most susceptible to the negative impacts of climate change – a third of the countries most vulnerable to climate change are in Eastern and Southern Africa. Recent scholarship underscores that Africa is warming faster than the global average, heightening climate vulnerability across the continent. Evidence from 2023-24 also shows that last year was the warmest on record globally, with escalating heatwaves and floods compounding risks to schooling.

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This article was originally published on the Brookings website.