The rural folk, especially in the arid and semi-arid areas, always experience hardship and poverty exacerbated by the adversity of climate change. It was not any different in the eastern part of Kenya, where my story begins.
Daily life revolved around one basic need: water. As a child, my marathon was running to the Athi River with donkeys, carrying jerricans down dusty paths and rocky hills. It was always under the scorching sun and the threat of crocodiles.
The lack of alternatives meant we had to disturb their dangerous habitat. Every so often, children and adults alike escaped with injuries, while others were not as fortunate.
We drank directly from the river, polluted by upstream waste from Nairobi. We swam not for leisure, but to cool our bodies before the uphill climb home. That was our childhood.
No packed lunches, no clean water, no safety nets. It was survival, and it came at the cost of missed school days and the burden of child labour.
Looking back, there is nothing about that life to miss. It was real human suffering. And yet, it is this very experience that explains why I am deeply passionate about climate action.
I know, firsthand, what degraded ecosystems mean for families. Deforestation upstream disrupted river flows. Soil erosion stripped the land bare.
Prolonged droughts pushed communities deeper into poverty. Climate vulnerability was not an abstract idea; it was the reality of my childhood.
The World Resources Institute notes that by 2050, nearly one billion people in Africa will face severe water stress unless urgent measures are taken. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report warns that children in Africa born in 2020 will experience four to five times more climate extremes in their lifetime compared to those born 60 years earlier.
These numbers confirm what some of us have lived through since birth.
This is why I advocate for the restoration of landscapes, for clean energy, sustainable food systems, and protection of natural resources that communities depend on.
Climate action should go beyond policy frameworks on paper and fancy global conferences. It is all about human dignity. It is about ensuring that the next generation does not spend its childhood fetching unsafe water or battling odds that should not exist in the first place.
May the policies get better and the actions move faster, so that no more generations have to endure the kind of suffering we went through. Because of that suffering, I now dedicate my voice and work to building solutions.
Climate action, for me, is not just a career path. It is a personal mission to turn pain into purpose and to make sure no child has to endure what we did in the dry and semi-arid eastern part of Kenya.
The writer is a climate action enthusiast and a communications specialist at Windward Communications Consultancy. [email protected]
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