Ms Jane Meriwas:

It is an honour to be in this House. I do not take it for granted. I am an indigenous woman from Kenya. I have come from Africa bringing stories of hope and resilience. We talk about the climate crisis and issues of drought. Where I come from, we have not seen rain for the past three and a half years. Yet, we are coping with resilience and hope.

As a woman with all those challenges and working with women and girls, I see many issues arising around climate change. Many girls drop out of school. It also disrupts the family unit in my community because there is no hope and our livelihood has died. We are a nomadic pastoralist community, but men have to go to urban centres to look for jobs and women are left at home, so the family unit is being disrupted. As a result, more girls are forced to marry at a tender age and to do other things to survive.

We talk about the issue of loss and damage. Where do we place these communities in that? We have been fighting for the past 30 years. We were given a loss and damage fund, but how do we ensure accessibility for communities that are not close to an urban centre and do not have phones? It will be difficult for them to apply. How do we ensure the fund reaches the less vulnerable? How do we ensure leaders who make decisions, like the committee members, push for policy to ensure when these funds become available people are educated to understand it is important for them to access the funds? That is why the members of the committee are leaders and that is why we need them. How do we also ensure the same funds and resources being pushed are accessible to more vulnerable women and girls? How can we ensure women sit at the same table, such as this one, to ensure they can raise their voices and ensure they are at the centre of decision making on critical issues such as finance and climate change? They must be at the same table to ensure their issues are communicated.