Dear Rihanna,
We congratulate you on growing your family and wish the best future for all.
Current family policies ensure children are tortured to death by their own parents, more and more animals are subjected to suffering and slaughter, many other species are wiped out, the gap between rich and poor widens, children are robbed of their potential because we do not invest in them, and each person has less of a say in their political systems – turning town halls where many rule to shopping malls where few rule. These policies have created the political space for the reemergence of abortion and contraception bans, and enable influencers in media to openly push women to have more children to grow economies.
Would you consider helping to change this? Your pregnancy could be used by companies and their media in the Global North to push women to have kids in order to create cheap labor and more consumers, or it could be part of a story of rewilding the earth by giving all kids equity of opportunity.
The Rejoice Africa Foundation is partnering with the Fair Start Movement to promote a joint project entitled The Seeds for the Future campaign.
Read more at Robert Mwesigye’s post here.
The idea is simple: Investments will go directly to women and their families in order to plant trees, expand kitchen gardens, and open saving accounts for their children – all at the same time. This mitigates the climate crisis, ensures food security and supplemental income, and moves towards equality of opportunity for children.
This has the greatest impact, long-run, on regenerative development. See our research below.
But this is the most important part.
This program, and Fair Star’s recent grant to Rejoice to support it, is not charity or altruism. This is done as part of loss and damage climate reparations, mandated by human rights regimes, per this complaint pending before the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The complaint calls on the United Nations to honor its obligation to ensure all children are born and raised in conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, which functionally requires climate restoration via birth equity family planning entitlements.
All children have a right to an ecososocial fair start in life as the first and overriding human right, defined as climate restoration and birth equity, and we can take the resources that were stolen from future generations to fund that start by all means effective.
This process, of baseline compensation, requires taking back wealth from those people and companies that imposed their costs on others by not ensuring birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Convention.
What does this mean exactly? Wealth today was created by externalizing the ecosocial costs of choosing the Cairo convention model of private families, over the fair and ecocentric model of wealth being contingent on ensuring that all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Children’s Convention, including historic climatological conditions. The world is in crisis today because we never paid those costs.
We owe future generations the difference, and you can test who is doing this and who is not – who is fundamentally just versus unjust – based on their position on the United Nations complaint above and these reparations. Fair Start has given a chunk of our annual budget as what we owe. Given that Exxon knew about the climate crisis and exacerbated it, they owe much more, and regardless of what the governments that colluded say and do to shield them.
TAKE ACTION: Donate directly to RAFUG for the Seeds for the Future campaign today, not as charity, but as fairness and reparations that bend the arc of who we are towards justice. The donations, through Wise or their bank account, go directly to RAFUG (which was recently inspected onsite and certified by the Republic of Uganda) and the families, whereas most international giving to programs in Uganda goes to charities in the Global North that take a percentage of the funds.
