Meet Binta: A Clean Cookstove Leader, Advocate, and Entrepreneur

Binta Yahaya is a community mobilizer and environmental advocate from Lere, a rural town in Kaduna State, Nigeria. In her town, most women and girls cook over open fires, and many suffer chronic respiratory infections and other health problems from the toxic smoke. Few are aware that cooking with an open fire is like burning…

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Beyond the Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies report

  The Shedding Light on Environmental Violence Initiative shows us that what happens to the land, happens to our bodies. Chrissy Swain, a leader featured in our Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies report, shares her experience of mercury poisoning caused by pollution from a paper mill near the Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) First Nation reserve in…

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Guatemala Women Standing Against Environmental Violence

A woman in Lote Ocho, Guatemala are filing negligence claims (in Canada) against a Canadian mining company whose employees that forcibly removed a women from her home, raped her and then burned her home to the ground. She is joined in her suit by 10 other women from her village, who were also gang-raped on…

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Why Women Have the Solutions to Climate Change

According to Yannick Glemarec, deputy executive direct of United Nations Women, and mirroring what WEA has seen in our own work in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, “Women are the first to be affected by climate change in every single country in the world.” Furthermore, women in so-called developing countries are hit the hardest. As…

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A Glimpse at Women-Led Movements

Dayamani Barla, the Indian journalist who led an extraordinary movement in an effort to stop ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company from displacing thousands of indigenous people in Jharkhand. She discusses her views on development and explains them from an indigenous world-view: “We want development, but not at our cost. We want development of our…

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