[00:00:01] Madeline: Hello and welcome to SHE SOARS. Her Voice. Her Rights.

[00:00:05] Amal: We are CARE Canada’s Youth Champions, a group of young people across Canada who are passionate advocates for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR).

[00:00:13] Lauren: We’re excited to discuss and raise awareness about young women’s rights and choices in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

[00:00:20] Amal: Together, we will explore how these global issues connect to our lives as Canadian youth and discover ways in which we can all take action.

[00:00:27] Lauren: We will also talk about the SHE SOARS* project, which improves access to health and education, which are areas we want to see change in.

[00:00:34] Everyone: Join us!

[00:00:40] Lauren: Welcome back to another episode of the SHE SOARS podcast! Her Rights. Her Voice. In honor of World Environment Day, we are focusing on a lesser-discussed but very important topic, which is the connection between Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) and climate change. For those who don’t know, World Environment Day is the United Nations’ Day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment.

[00:01:04] Amal: As is becoming more and more clear as time passes, climate change impacts all aspects of our lives. And as youth advocates for global SRHR, we thought it would be important to discuss the relationship between access to health services and the climate. Keep listening about what this relationship looks like and what we can do to counteract these negative impacts. So today we’re joined with Rebecca Davidson, CARE Canada’s Chief of Party for the SHE SOARS project. Rebecca will be providing some insights into this topic and how it looks in the context of the SHE SOARS project countries like Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

[00:01:39] Lauren: So Rebecca, before we dive in, could you please share a bit more about your background and your role in the SHE SOARS project?

[00:01:46] Rebecca Davidson: Yeah. So my title is Chief of Party but that’s just a fancy term for project director and so my role is to support the teams in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia to implement the SHE SOARS project, which as you know is an Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights project. I come to this role with around 15 years of experience in global health work. So I’ve done roles with different international organizations around program design, development of proposals and implementing programming to leading teams and doing some influencing around policies linked to global health. So I’ve been involved in the different sort of facets of global health and I’m very passionate about women and girls’ right to bodily autonomy.

[00:02:27] Amal: Thank you so much for introducing yourself and a bit of work that you do. To dive into the topic today, we’ve learned through research that climate change can make pre-existing inequalities worse and negatively impact women and girls in particular. So Rebecca, could you please share some of the ways in which SRHR issues grow when climate change is present?

[00:02:48] Rebecca Davidson: Sure, and maybe just with the caveat that I’m not an expert on climate change but someone that’s very concerned about the impact of climate change and really wanting to understand more deeply those connections between Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and changing climates. And so I have dug in a bit to the research and I’ve also drawn upon CARE’S global expertise working in food and water systems in humanitarian response, and tried to pull out some of those connections and programmatic experience. And from what I’ve learned, there’s really four areas that I’d love to highlight today. One is around heat. The other is around flooding. Another is gender and social norms and the impact and relationship with women and girls’ ability to access their rights and health services. And also the link between food insecurity and nutrition and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. 

[00:03:42] Rebecca Davidson: The first area in terms of rising temperatures is that there’s a body of evidence, particularly in places that are already hot, where we’re seeing real impacts on pregnant women, in particular eclampsia, which is a very serious condition in pregnancy. We’re seeing an increase in preterm birth, so babies born before their due date. And we’re also seeing an increase in newborn stunting so that means babies are not getting the proper nutrition in utero. So those are all very concerning as our planet heats up, some very real health impacts for pregnant women in particular and their babies. The second area is around flooding. So sort of the opposite where we have too much rain too quickly and that can impact waterborne diseases. But more importantly when it comes to Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights we can see communities cut off for long periods of time from services so they can’t get to a health center. And that means access to medicines like contraception can be a barrier.

[00:04:44] Rebecca Davidson: The other area is a bit more complicated around food insecurity. So as we see flooding and droughts we know that food production goes down and that can impact the nutritional status of women and girls. We know anemia is a major issue in many developing countries. Over 600 million women and girls worldwide have anemia. And when you layer that for particularly younger girls, adolescent girls, who have a number of additional risk factors in pregnancy, the result is really a very high maternal mortality rate for adolescent girls. In fact, it’s the leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 in developing countries. 

[00:05:24] Rebecca Davidson: And then the other piece is really around gender and social norms. So in many of the places that we work women and girls are responsible for collecting firewood and for collecting water. As you know, an increase in deforestation happens as water becomes more scarce. That means women and girls have to travel longer distances and that takes them away from other really important livelihoods components but it also means that they have more protection risks when it comes to gender-based violence if they’re traveling longer distances outside of their communities.

[00:05:56] Rebecca Davidson: So those are some of the key areas in which SRHR is impacted by climate change. And I guess the other piece to mention is that we also see a link between food insecurity and increased rates of child and early forced marriage and that really links to right to bodily autonomy, to choose when and if you’re going to be married. And this is really prevalent in areas where there’s a dowry system; families are really struggling to survive and when they’re in times of crisis the dowry can take the form of cattle or other resources that can help a family survive a crisis. So those are some of the sort of areas that are emerging in terms of the links between a changing climate and Sexual Reproductive Health Rights.

[00:06:38] Lauren: Great. Thanks so much for that answer. Yeah, I think I came into this conversation knowing a bit about the connections but not too much in depth and that really laid it out how urgent and pervasive it is in a lot of areas of life. So thank you for sharing that. A follow up question to that is how have those areas of connection points between climate change and SRHR presented themselves in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia? And then consequently, how is the SHE SOARS project tackling these SRHR issues in relation to the environment?

[00:07:09] Rebecca Davidson: Yeah, that’s a really good question and it’s something that we’re thinking about a lot along with our project teams. In Uganda, we’re working with communities that are largely made up of refugees and so we’re working in host communities and many of those refugees are from South Sudan. Now that’s a complicated context but when you layer in massive flooding over the last few years that has also increased the influx of people into Uganda, into the communities in which we’re working, that’s certainly affected the project design and the services available to people within those communities. Similarly in Zambia, in the last two years since I’ve been working on this project we’ve had communities cut off for more than a month because of flooding. And again, as I mentioned that impacts access to health services.

[00:07:58] Rebecca Davidson: In Kenya we’ve had the opposite issue in terms of drought. Kenya has been facing the worst drought in over 40 years. There has been four consecutive years of low rainfall and in some of the communities in which we’re implementing, they’re pastoralists, so they need to move with cattle to access water. And so we’ve had challenges in Kenya, particularly engaging boys who often have that responsibility of moving with the cattle to find water. And of course cattle are also a huge source of iron in terms of meat and also accessing milk, which comes back to the nutrition issue and anemia of women and girls. So we’ve been seeing the impact of climate change in the project in all three countries. The way in which we’re trying to respond is really think about resilient livelihoods. So yes, SHE SOARS is a project focused on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights. But we also have an economic empowerment component, and part of that is looking at what are the available resources in a community and how do we support young people in particular to have adaptive livelihood strategies in the face of a changing climate, particularly when we’re thinking about agricultural activities and thinking about adaptive farming interventions or approaches.

[00:09:13] Rebecca Davidson: So we’re actually doing training with the Climate Justice team at CARE to integrate that into the livelihoods and Youth Savings and Loans Associations curriculum so that young people and communities are empowered with the ability to understand what the changing climate looks like in their community and how can they adapt so that they can have livelihood opportunities that can support them. And I think the other key area is making sure that health services, particularly contraception, are available in communities. So we’re working with community health workers, community health entrepreneurs, and we’re experimenting in Zambia with community-based distributors, which are really just young people that are trained to be able to provide contraception to their peers within their community.

[00:10:00] Rebecca Davidson: So when we know rainy season is coming up can we stock them up and make sure that those commodities are available in communities so that the distribution or the supply chain isn’t cut off when there’s flooding. Then I think the third piece is really around gender and social norms change. We’re really trying to encourage men and boys to be partners of women and girls and to take on more equal responsibilities at the household level so that they can carry the burden more equally when it comes to having to do some of these household chores like collecting water and firewood, that take a lot of time. And trying to shift the burden so that women and girls aren’t carrying that heavy load alone.

[00:10:35] Amal: Thank you so much. It’s great to hear about the interventions that are linked with climate change that the SHE SOARS project is working on. So I guess another aspect that we were wondering about is what steps can policy makers and governments take to address the relationship between SRHR issues and climate change?

[00:10:55] Rebecca Davidson: That’s a really good one that I’ve been thinking a lot about as climate change becomes a more prominent issue within the development world and of course food security has been elevated given the many different droughts that are happening around the world and the impact on people. What I’ve been trying to sort of elevator amplify is the need to have SRHR, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, a component of our response, our international programming to support communities to be resilient in the face of climate change. I really feel like it’s important for women and girls’ holistic needs to be considered. We hear a lot in the donor world, in the development world, a gender responsive approach to climate change. But what that really means is understanding what women and girls need and responding to that. I think this component of bodily autonomy, being able to decide when and if a woman or a girl would like to have a child and make decisions about who she’s going to marry, those are all really important components to build community resilience to climate change and really make sure that we’re supporting communities in that way.

[00:12:04] Rebecca Davidson: Funding is important. But also thinking from a more holistic approach I think is important. You know, we really want to keep governments supporting this type of programming. But I think if you take a step back, you also need to look at the vast majority of contributors to greenhouse gas emissions are in the global North and in growing economies. And so we have a greater responsibility to be supporting these countries and these communities that are facing the most impact. The richer countries are not going to feel the impact of climate change like poor communities are, particularly women and girls. So not only do we have a responsibility to continue funding resilience programming, but we also have a responsibility to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and be really proactive and take this seriously because we’re seeing the impact in many of the communities in which we work, and it’s just going to continue to drive humanitarian crises around the world.

[00:13:00] Lauren: Thanks so much for that answer. So this is kind of a question for the group diving off of that point you just made about the burden of responsibility in different countries based on how much we’ve actually been responsible for producing the climate change. So the question is why is this topic important to all of us? And not just those that are being the most impacted, but everyone on a systemic level, and how can we all take action in our lives in both small and systemic ways?

[00:13:26] Rebecca Davidson: I mean I think that we’re interconnected whether we like it or not, whether we want to admit that or not. So I think all of us should be very concerned about climate change, particularly for the next generation. I’m also a mother and I’m very concerned for my children in terms of what the planet will look like when they grow up and you know that concern is global. That’s a universal concern of mothers around the world. So I think we have a collective responsibility to take care of each other but also of the planet. And we see all the different ways in which you know, I think Covid was a great example of this connection of our health to the ecosystem, to animals, and I think there’s a growing understanding of sort of this one health model or way in which we could adapt. And I think it’s clear this is another example of how the actions of folks in one part of the world greatly and deeply impact those in another part of the world. I think we’re continually reminded of how interconnected we are as humans on this planet.

[00:14:24] Lauren: Yeah. Bouncing off of that, I know for me, in my university time, I was part of a few different advocacy groups that were advocating for the United Nations 2030 agenda, which is all of the Sustainable Development Goals that we’re hoping to achieve by the next seven years or so. So yeah, I was part of Engineers Without Borders and a few different local climate change groups and I felt like that was empowering as a young person, feeling like I was having an opportunity to share my voice and my concerns with politicians, local business leaders, things like that.

[00:14:56] Lauren: I would really encourage the young listeners out there to get involved with some of those student groups. I think it’s really an accessible option. And if your university days are behind you, like they are for me, I know there’s a lot of community groups you can get involved in as well. Even just like letter writing to local politicians and things like that. It really does put the pressure on and helps keep climate change as a priority in the policy agenda. So I think that’s a great way that you can take action in your life and feel a bit more empowered and less helpless about the situation.

[00:15:26] Amal: Yeah, I feel that, even as a student in public health, the idea that everything is connected and all health issues are connected around the globe. And even some small actions that I’ve learned through taking health classes are just the small actions of like recycling, cutting down on emissions, and carpooling. Those are some small ways that people can get involved in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I think the other ones that Lauren mentioned about letter writing and meeting with politicians are great ways to drive policy sector changes. Well, thank you so much Rebecca for joining us today to talk a little bit about climate change and how that overlaps with Sexual and Reproductive Health and how the SHE SOARS project is going about combating that issue. 

[00:16:11] Rebecca Davidson: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure to be a guest on the podcast that I listen to all the time.

[00:16:17] Amal: Yes, it was really great to connect with you. So thank you everyone for listening. Stay tuned for our next episode where we’ll be diving deeper into the topic with a youth global health advocate on climate change.

[00:16:30] Lauren: Thanks everyone, and thanks for joining, Rebecca.

[00:16:31] Rebecca Davidson: Thank you.

[00:16:32] Amal: Thank you! Thanks for listening to SHE SOARS. If you liked this episode, please share it on social media, connect with us in the comments or give us a like.

[00:16:43] Lauren: Make sure to catch our next episode by subscribing to our channel and following us wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:16:49] Madeline: Follow @carecanada on Instagram for updates on our show and the project.

[00:16:54] Lauren: SHE SOARS stands for Sexual and reproductive Health and Economic empowerment supporting Out-of-school Adolescent girls’ Rights and Skills in Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

[00:17:04] Madeline: The project is funded by Global Affairs Canada. Check out our global partner organizations:

[00:17:10] Amal: Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Restless Development for even more project updates.

[00:17:19] Lauren: Thanks again for listening. Until next time!