Our two-day Creatives Climate Café was co-led by GENERATE and the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC), with support from the British Council, The Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, FOTEA, Uganda Press Photo Award (UPPA), Media Challenge Initiative, Design Hub Kampala, and the Embassy of France in Kampala.
As Juliet Grace Luwedde, regional coordinator for the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change, reflects: “The idea of the Creatives Climate Café was to bring together creative minds — storytellers, poets, painters, photographers and children — in Kampala to interpret or simplify conversations around climate, and to think together of how to tell the success stories about the changes that are happening. A government official also joined us to explore possible collaborations to report about their work on climate, which is one of the biggest outcomes of the Climate Café: people realizing that conversations on climate change need to happen outside of conference rooms”.
The Café was scheduled around World Environment Day 2022 and provided an opportunity for over 100 young people, creatives, activists, journalists and others interested in the issue of climate change in Uganda to come together and engage in creative responses and push for more climate action at the national and international scale.
The event included a keynote from the French Ambassador to Uganda, and comprised of interactive creative sessions on climate change and creative writing, photography, storytelling, and gender justice. The event provided new lessons and skills for a collection of engaged young people and creatives, as well as engaging key policymakers and stakeholders in better understanding the role of the arts and creative expression in climate action and policy.
The Café span out into new partnerships between media, practitioners, third sector organisations and artists, and reported new programmes of activity and practice focused on social inclusion and climate change, especially using creative arts to share climate stories.
