Douglas Drake Onen

Somehow I keep waking up in different countries talking about the same thing: how do we make climate action make sense in people’s everyday lives? 📍Kigali, Rwanda 🇷🇼 I delivered the keynote address at the 74th Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum (GHACOF 74) under the theme, “Harnessing Climate Services for Early Action and Resilience in the Greater Horn of Africa Region in the Face of a Strong El Niño.” Now, in many African communities they may not understand what El Niño means in scientific language. But they understands what it means when the rains do not come when they should. They understand when they come too heavily and wash away the road to the market. They understand when a crop planted with borrowed money is destroyed, when food becomes more expensive, and when a family begins deciding which meal to skip. That is the El Niño the ordinary person understands. We keep asking young people to dream, innovate, start businesses and go into agriculture. But how does a young person chase a dream on an empty stomach? How do you ask somebody to think about building the Africa of 2040 when their household is deciding which meal to skip tonight? And how do we expect that young person to remain excited about agriculture when they can lose in one afternoon what took them an entire year to save? Then suppose they actually listen to us. They borrow money, buy seed, plant, and one bad season destroys everything. So I asked: what exactly is early about our early warning if we know what is coming, but still wait until people are already suffering to act? Knowing early must mean acting early. The information must move with the seed, the agricultural advice, the finance, the insurance and the government response that allow people to actually prepare. And if we are serious about youth participation, then at some point participation must become jobs, businesses, contracts, capital and ownership. Because young people cannot build businesses on applause. In the end, it is not enough to know that suffering is coming. The real question is: because we knew, what did we do to lessen that suffering? #GHACOF74 #ClimateServices #EarlyAction #ClimateResilience #AfricanYouth #FoodSystems