Reparative Rebirth: African Children at the Heart of Climate Justice and Sovereignty
From The Observatory
Source: The Observatory
Millions of African children are born into overlapping crises, and true climate justice must begin with birth equity to uphold human rights, sovereignty, and reparative action.
This article was produced for the Observatory by] the Independent Media Institute. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
“Reparative Rebirth: African Children at the Heart of Climate Justice and Sovereignty” by Esther Afolaranmi is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.
Introduction
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice held its first hearings on states’ climate responsibilities in decades. A lead judge described climate change as an “urgent and existential threat,” acknowledging that future generations are central to the crisis. Yet the hearings failed to explicitly center the most affected population—children born in economically poor nations, especially in Africa.
Every generation is shaped by the terms of its arrival. In Africa, millions of children are born not simply into poverty but into a geopolitical order designed to limit their chances at survival, dignity, and influence. This is not only a local governance failure; it is the outcome of global systems that reward extraction and devalue Black life. African births now occur within a compound crisis: ecological collapse, economic neocolonialism, and the persistent denial of reproductive justice.
If climate justice is to be more than rhetoric, it must begin at the site of birth. Without confronting the global structures that predetermine the lives of African children, reform remains performative, and structural violence persists. A just world must be built not on the backs of children, but around the recognition of their humanity and political personhood from the beginning.
Birth as a Test of Legitimacy
Every legal system that claims authority over its people must earn legitimacy through equitable empowerment. That legitimacy begins with birth. Yet, for African children, birth has long been stripped of political meaning. Global discourse privatizes birth, treating it as an individual matter rather than a shared responsibility. This narrative obscures the truth: birth outcomes are structured by centuries of colonial exploitation, racial capitalism, and today’s climate collapse.
African states are bound by the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Maputo Protocol, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. These legal principles and frameworks are not abstract ideals—they directly shape the conditions into which millions of African children are born. When legitimacy is denied at birth, children face higher risks of malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, and limited educational opportunities, making structural inequities a daily reality rather than a distant policy question. But these obligations are constantly undermined by debt negotiations in Washington, aid conditionalities in Brussels, and fossil fuel investment deals signed in London and Beijing. The result is that African birth has been colonized—its outcomes dictated not by parents or communities, but by boardrooms and parliaments oceans away. This is not just theoretical—millions of children face hunger and malnutrition as aid cuts ripple across the continent.
The Climate Debt to Africa’s Children
IPCC’s 2025 Update on Children and Climate confirmed what families across the continent already know: more than 450 million children worldwide face extreme climate risks, with Sub-Saharan Africa hardest hit. In 2025 alone, lethal heatwaves scorched Lagos, cholera outbreaks returned to Malawi after floods, and farmers in Niger warned of famine as erratic rains destroyed harvests. These are not future risks—they are shaping the first breaths of millions of African children right now.
For decades, wealthy nations reaped the benefits of industrial growth while exporting ecological and economic harm. Today, African children inherit a crisis they did not create, born into heat, hunger, and displacement. Yet global climate frameworks rarely treat them as creditors holding claims for reparations. Instead, finance mechanisms continue to see African states as passive recipients. Worse, they prioritize GDP metrics and carbon offsetting over what truly matters: guaranteeing every child a safe, nurturing, and ecologically sound start in life.
The extreme climate impacts African children now face are not random misfortunes—they are the material consequences of the structural inequities and denied legitimacy described above, showing how systemic neglect and global power imbalances shape the very conditions of their birth.
Reproductive Justice and Climate Adaptation
To correct these harms, we must adopt a doctrine of “reparative family justice.” It begins from three truths. First, birth equity is a human right and a condition for sovereignty: no state can claim legitimacy if children are born without access to health, education, or security. Second, wealth built on childhood deprivation is illegitimate and must be repaired through redistribution of resources accumulated from colonial extraction and environmental exploitation. Third, children are political beings with standing—their rights extend to challenging the conditions of their birth and demanding accountability from both states and corporations.
This doctrine has real-world application. In an ongoing petition before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, petitioners (including my organization, Fair Start Movement) demand binding international standards for equitable birth conditions tied to climate finance and foreign aid. Sovereign equity trust funds, financed through climate reparations and loss-and-damage payments, could secure child welfare across generations. Transparency laws requiring corporations and governments to disclose how their actions affect childbirth and early development would turn lofty pledges of “sustainability” into enforceable obligations.
On the continent, the struggle for reproductive justice is inseparable from the fight for climate justice. Women in rural and climate-vulnerable regions already navigate collapsing health systems and shrinking resources. Their reproductive choices are less about autonomy than about survival, often constrained by hunger, displacement, or extractive development projects.
Reproductive justice in Africa must therefore mean universal access to reproductive healthcare, including maternal mental health and safe delivery. It must mean climate adaptation policies that value caregiving economies and unpaid labor. And it must mean securing women’s and children’s land rights, recognizing their roles as ecological stewards and defenders of sovereignty. Without these reforms, talk of “development” remains empty.
Reclaiming the Future
By implementing these frameworks of reparative and reproductive justice, global systems can begin to restore their legitimacy and ensure that African children are born into conditions of dignity, safety, and opportunity. Only by centering birth equity can we reclaim a future where no child’s life is determined by structural neglect or ecological harm.
The true legitimacy of global systems—legal, political, or economic—must be measured not by treaties or speeches but by the life chances of a child born in Lusaka, Lagos, or Monrovia. That child’s access to clean air, safe shelter, nutritious food, and early education is the most accurate test of our values.
Today’s world sits atop a mountain of violated birthrights and ecological theft. Undoing that legacy means centering birth justice as the keystone of global policy. “Reparative rebirth” is not a metaphor—it is a demand for sovereignty that begins at birth, for justice that includes the unborn, and for a future where no child’s life is collateral for someone else’s gain. We owe African children not just survival, but justice. And justice begins the moment they enter the world.
