Thank you to everyone who stood with young people to call for urgent climate action and gender transformative education.
Transform Education (hosted by United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative), including Malala Fund fellows and supported by Plan International, has developed a youth-led statement of recommendations with a feminist lens. Its aim is to explain the current gaps in climate education and the value of a gender transformative education to advance climate justice. Because #EducationShiftsPower.
What is gender-transformative education?
Gender-transformative education acknowledges the structural inequalities that prevent girls from accessing equal opportunities in their families, communities and educational settings, and seeks to address these barriers.
It does this by outlining targets and standards for gender equality in all of these contexts, and calls for the allocation of resources and political investment to meet them.
Gender transformative education can equip girls and all young people with the skills and knowledge needed to tackle the climate crisis, claim and exercise their rights, and empower them to be leaders and decision-makers.
We are urgently calling on our government to act now.
With the close of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (also known as the Conference of Parties, or COP26), the Australian government has a responsibility to enable girls’ education and youth leadership by funding and supporting the implementation of donor-recipient countries’ national climate action plans and national action for climate empowerment agendas.
Now is the time for our government to commit to gender transformative education for climate change through the Australian Aid program and the Australia Pacific Climate Partnership.
Please join us in urging the Australian government to support the recommendations from the youth-led statement, so that the value of gender transformative education is highlighted through these programs. This statement provides a roadmap that world leaders and organisations can work towards, to advance climate and gender justice.
Plan International Australia also stands in solidarity with Australian youth and their calls for climate justice and climate action.
Globally Plan International is asking all governments to make a pledge to incorporate girls’ education and gender transformative climate education, and we are calling on the Australian Government to do the same.
With so much at stake for people and the planet, the transformative power of education must be leveraged to build a more equal, peaceful, and sustainable world.