There is a particular kind of rage that lives quietly in the chest of a child who has watched the only thing her family ever owned — a small plot of land, a few goats, a mud-walled home — be swallowed by floodwaters that science says were made three times more likely by a planet warming at the hands of others. She did not cause this. Her country did not cause this. And yet she is standing in the wreckage, barefoot, with nowhere to go and no one who has been made to answer for it.
It was precisely to document and amplify that rage — and to transform it into policy — that the African Center for Health, Climate & Gender Justice Alliance (ACHCGA) began its extraordinary journey into the world’s most complex climate negotiations. What follows is the story of that journey: from a seaside conference hall in Egypt to the corridors of the Santiago Network, and from the Amazon rainforest of Brazil to the cold bureaucratic chambers of Baku, Azerbaijan.
It is a story about an NGO that refused to be a bystander.
It started, as so many movements do, with an act of deliberate courage in an unlikely place. At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, ACHCGA launched its Loss and Damage campaign in close collaboration with UNFPA — the United Nations Population Fund. The air in Sharm el-Sheikh that year was electric with expectation; developing nations had spent years demanding that wealthy, high emitting countries acknowledge and compensate for climate-induced destruction. And for the first time, the world was listening.
But ACHCGA did not arrive merely to observe. The organization brought something that no delegation of diplomats could replicate: a child ambassador — a young Kenyan whose presence on the world stage put a human face on the sterile phrase “loss and damage.” This child stood not as a symbol, but as a frontliner documenting, in real time, what climate-induced loss looks like when it strips a community of its crops, its coastline, its culture.
Alongside this powerful debut, ACHCGA forged a vital intellectual partnership with the Loss and Damage Collaborators — a consortium of researchers and advocates — to understand what the priorities for loss and damage look like from the perspective of the Global North, and how those priorities diverged, often sharply, from the lived realities of communities in Africa. That gap between Geneva and the grassroots became ACHCGA’s map.
From Sharm el-Sheikh, ACHCGA’s journey did not slow — it accelerated. The organization’s footprint grew to span continents, negotiations, and national policy tables. Each stop on the road deepened both its expertise and its conviction.
In partnership with Kenya's Climate Change Directorate and with sponsorship from UNFPA, ACHCGA participated in the international climate negotiations on loss and damage in Baku. For a Kenyan NGO to hold space in those rooms — alongside nation states, multilateral institutions, and powerful lobbying blocs — was no small thing. ACHCGA brought the voice of community; it left with the language of policy.
The global stage matters. But so does the school hall in Nairobi. ACHCGA brought its negotiations experience home, contributing to capacity development for youth climate champions across Kenya — building the next generation of advocates who would carry the loss and damage argument into communities, county governments, and national policy forums.
Invited by both UNFPA ESARO and UNFPA Brazil, ACHCGA attended the landmark Pre-COP30 Amazonia Global Symposium on Climate Justice and Impacted Populations, held in Brazil's capital from July 28–31, 2025. The event, co-hosted by UNFPA and the Government of Brazil, convened government delegates, civil society, economists, and health experts from over twenty nations. It was here that ACHCGA's Strategic Lead, Imali Ngusale, moderated a pivotal session, sitting alongside a World Bank senior economist who noted bluntly that the poor in Brazil are disproportionately crushed by natural disasters, and that Latin America and the Caribbean faces its steepest poverty increases from climate events. The session affirmed what ACHCGA had long known: across continents, it is always the already-vulnerable who inherit the worst of a crisis they did not create.
In late 2025 and early 2026, ACHCGA became part of something historic on its own soil. The organisation was among a small, select group of NGOs invited to a landmark national process: the operationalization of the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM) — the framework that governs how global loss and damage commitments under Article 8 of the Paris Agreement will actually translate into support for vulnerable communities.
Around the table sat an extraordinary assembly: professors and disaster management experts from Masinde Muliro University, county governments from Kisumu, Turkana, and Busia, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), KIPPRA, the State Department of Gender and Affirmative Action, the National Treasury, Egerton University, the NDC Partnership, the National Social Protection Secretariat, UNFPA, and climate directors from Turkana, Marsabit, Kisumu, and Nakuru Counties.
The Barbados Implementation Modalities are not abstract diplomatic language. They are the operational blueprint for how the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage will reach communities that have suffered — and continue to suffer — from climate impacts they did not cause.
Critically, the BIM establishes that support will be needs-based and capped, with defined priorities for the most climate-vulnerable countries. For Kenya — battling intensifying floods in the west, prolonged drought in the north, and coastal erosion along its Indian Ocean shoreline — this is not a theoretical framework. It is a potential lifeline.
Kenya’s Climate Change Directorate, in partnership with UNFPA Kenya, has now launched an initiative to domesticate the BIM, building on momentum from COP30 in Belém, November 2025, where Parties advanced implementation of the Fund. ACHCGA’s seat at these national discussions was not just significant — it was earned.
For ACHCGA, these sessions were equal parts learning curve and validation. The organization had spent years building the argument at the international level. Now it was being invited to help shape how that argument lands at home — in the counties, in the ministries, in the lives of farmers in Turkana who cannot name the Paris Agreement but feel its failures every dry season.
Conferences and negotiations are necessary. But they are not sufficient. ACHCGA understands something that many policy organizations do not: the
fight for climate justice must also be waged in the scroll, the share, and the fifteen-second video that stops a thumb in its tracks. Through sustained campaigns across Instagram, TikTok, and X, ACHCGA has built a growing digital ecosystem — gathering impressions, generating conversations, and converting passive observers into active advocates. The organisation continues to demand that loss and damage funding be released, and it is doing so in every register available: from the formal language of multilateral negotiations to the urgent vernacular of social media.
These are not vanity metrics. Every impression is a potential champion. Every share is a vote for accountability. ACHCGA is building the constituency that loss and damage needs — not in Geneva, but in Nairobi, in Kisumu, in the corners of the internet where young Kenyans are already asking why the world’s richest nations have not yet paid for what they broke.
There is a temptation, when reading about international climate negotiations, to see them as the exclusive domain of nation-states, multilateral banks, and well resourced think tanks. ACHCGA’s journey is a rebuke of that assumption.
This is an African NGO — rooted in health, gender justice, and the granular, unglamorous work of community advocacy — that has planted itself, deliberately and persistently, at every table where the future of loss and damage is being decided. From the heat of Sharm el-Sheikh to the rainforest humidity of Brasília. From the negotiating chambers of Baku to a county government meeting room in Kisumu. ACHCGA has shown up.
It has shown up with a child ambassador who made loss and damage impossible to ignore. It has shown up with researchers, with data, with campaigns, with policy recommendations. It has built partnerships with UNFPA, with national climate directorates, with Loss and Damage Collaborators, and with universities. It has trained youth champions and moderated international panels.
And it has done all of this because the communities it serves — the farmers watching their topsoil wash away, the women whose reproductive health is disrupted by displacement, the children who grow up understanding drought the way other children understand seasons — cannot wait for a perfect political moment.
The road to the Santiago Network is not a straight one. But ACHCGA has proven that it is navigable — even, and especially, for those who begin with nothing but urgency and conviction.
ACHCGA continues its campaigns for the release of loss and damage funding. The fight is not over. It is, in many ways, just beginning. And Africa — scarred, resilient, and unsilenceable — will not be erased from the story of its own survival.
