Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim is one of the founders of the Association of Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad, a group fighting to defend the environment and the rights of indigenous people. The Mbororo, which means “cattle herder”, are an ethnic subgroup of 250,000 members of the Fulani, the largest nomadic people in the world, inhabitants of central and western Africa.
In Mbororo culture, few girls are allowed to study. But Ibrahim’s parents allowed her and her sisters to attend school in Chad’s capital. Witnessing how climate change affects the life of her community, which survives from small-scale farming and cattle-raising in the arid Sahel area, in the southern part of the Sahara Desert, Ibrahim has challenged her own people, helping to raise awareness among her village’s elderly chiefs of the value of women’s advice, and to think together about how to adapt to adversity. For years, they have been experiencing the effects of Lake Chad drying up; the lake is a vital source of water for people from Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, and is now 10% of its size from the 1960s.
In a written testimony to the International Organization for Migration, Ibrahim emphasized that her people, and indigenous communities like her own, are “direct victims of climate change,” which has worked to displace them, forcing them to abandon their own lands in search of ones that can sustain their way of life.
“We live in a world that prioritizes high-tech, high-cost solutions. Yet it is indigenous peoples who – more than anyone else on the planet – are succeeding at one of the most readily available climate solutions out there: keeping the natural world alive.”
Location: Chad, Africa
Organization: Association of Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad
Video 1: TED Talk
