By Ayuska Motha, AWC Cologne
2024 was the year that several of the projects that I have been working on for many years all came together in a powerful synergy. Thanks to Laurie Richardson, FAWCO has been a member of the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) for as long as I have been the FAWCO UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) representative. Within the WGC, FAWCO advocates alongside at least 53 other women’s and environmental civil society organizations “to ensure that human rights and gender equality are firmly anchored in all climate actions under the UNFCCC.”
Since 2018, I have also been a jury member for the Gender Just Climate Solutions Award (GJCS). These awards, supported by Women Engage for a Common Future (WECF) and the WGC, highlight grassroots initiatives that champion climate action and gender justice. Every year, the international jury goes through hundreds of applications to select three winners who are announced at the annual UN Climate Summit (officially known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP). Every year, it gets harder and harder to select from so many varying, impactful, yet sadly under-funded initiatives. The three winners attend the COP in person to accept their EUR 5,000 prize money and, more importantly, they gain access to a growing network of previous years’ winners to participate in a valuable mentoring program. 
In addition to the three winning projects selected in the categories of technical, non-technical and transformational, additional noteworthy projects are selected to be included and showcased in the annual brochure with the aim of highlighting these real, proven and community-led projects.
Since 2021, I have also been working on another project that grew out of my GJCS jury involvement. Let me tell you how it evolved. After several years of working on the jury, I felt that many of the incredible projects I was seeing were not given enough attention (and subsequently lacked adequate financing). These projects need funding to be replicated or scaled up, especially since only 0.01% of global finance supports the climate and women’s rights.
When the jury process went virtual during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, tools such as Zoom were more freely available to many, so one of the other jury members, Peg Spitzer, and I started brainstorming together on Zoom every now and then. I had decided that I wanted to work on highlighting the projects from the perspective of the feminist activists as narrators, so the audience could connect on a more human level with the grassroots work being conducted. Peg had been involved in conducting oral histories for many years. Simply put, an oral history is the recording of a speaker sharing their personal experiences and opinions. We decided to try out conducting oral history interviews of some of the Gender Just Climate Solutions winners.
This experiment eventually led to additional oral history interviews of feminist activists and, much later, the founding of the non-profit the “Climate Knowledge Collective.” One of the narrators included in the collection is none other than, Peninah Nthenya Musyimi, from FAWCO’s Target Project: Awesome Blossoms (scroll down the oral histories here to find her section). The oral history itself is exceptional. Take a look at it here .
So, at the end of 2024, several of the different projects I had been working on for years – including my work as a jury member for the Gender Just Climate Solutions awards, my work as the FAWCO UNFCCC representative, and my work with the Climate Knowledge Collective – all came together when FAWCO’s Target Project: Awesome Blossoms was included on page 28 of the GJCS brochure. Check it out!
Ayuska Motha, AIWC Cologne, has been FAWCO’s UNFCCC representative for eight years. She also acts as FAWCO’s Liaison to the Women and Gender Constituency and has acted as the head of delegation for the past four years. Ayuska is interested in uplifting small-scale, community-led solutions to the climate crisis and is looking for holistic ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Images: Gender Just Climate Solutions free brochure.
