Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, president of AFPAT, is the spokesperson for the women of the Peule M’Bororo community in Chad. Indigenous people, guardians of the ecosystems. And their ancestral knowledge of the Sahel band makes them climate experts. Yet it is a question of survival for them and for us.
These women are engineers of nature and guardians of ecosystems.
They are the driving force behind resource management and environmental protection, because their lives depend entirely on it.
To make progress on these issues, we organise workshops to exchange knowledge on plants and medicinal knowledge to help them manage and maintain the ecosystem, despite the impacts of climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
Their nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life has always enabled them to maintain this balance. They are experts because they are truly connected to their environment. It’s not like at school with statistics and tables; it’s an ancestral knowledge based on the observation of nature, animals, fauna…
They don’t need to count the number of trees, to say how many greenhouse gases it takes to retain them, because a tree isn’t just the leaves and trunks… It’s many species that roam around it like insects eating the leaves or termites at the bottom, birds… It’s a set of ecosystems that they know perfectly well.
They also know that if the desert takes over, it means that it will silt up all these ecosystems and water points. This is why it is necessary to maintain the balance of each ecosystem with its diversity and its species. If one of them disappears, the whole chain is destroyed.
These women have a lot to contribute because they have been maintaining these ecosystems naturally for millennia. For example, by moving livestock from one place to another, the cow dung of the cows will fertilize the land without chemical fertilizers. Similarly, they know when to leave their nomadic camp so that the ecosystem can be regenerated naturally.
You will better understand why we are fighting for access to water, energy, to live decently on a land that we have always protected.
We have solutions to propose to the world such as the return to ancestral knowledge, but we are not listened to as we should be. We are still left out of all environmental decisions at the international level.
Today, my mission is to make the world understand the reality on the ground and to make the voice of these experts heard.
I am also trying to make the world understand that we cannot make a decision that only fixes the economy and politics, it must fix the planet and the people, respecting equity, justice and human rights.
These values have been lost and I am here to tell the Western world that there is still a chance to save the Earth.
If we recreate this solidarity, this sharing, if we respect the human species as a whole (humans and non-humans such as insects, trees, plants, animals…) then the world will be much more advanced and the Earth can be preserved.
We, as indigenous peoples, have a role to play in building a more sustainable world.
I would like decision-makers to understand that climate change is affecting humanity and that a large part of this humanity is made up of women.
Credit: Salma Khalil
