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Break Free!

At the Crossroads of Climate Change, SRHR, Gender, and Education: Finding Pathways to Resilience

Authors
Pam Baatsen, Hannah Kabelka, Anne Karan
Publication year
Augustus 2025

This review highlights the urgent need to address the intersecting impacts of climate change on adolescents and young people in Southern Africa—particularly in relation to SRHR, gender equality, and education. Climate change exacerbates existing structural inequalities, disproportionately affecting marginalised groups such as girls, LGBTQI+ youth, young people with disabilities, and those living in poverty or displacement. These groups face cascading harms: school closures, increased gender-based violence, disrupted SRHR services, and harmful coping strategies such as child marriage or transactional sex. These disruptions are interconnected and cyclical, reinforcing poverty, reducing access to education and health services, and deepening gendered vulnerabilities.

Related project

  • Break Free! – Young people advocate for their sexual and reproductive health and rights

    • Institute
    • Project

    Youth-led advocacy: motivated, but under-resourced Young people across programme countries view themselves as central stakeholders in SRHR and are strongly motivated to drive change. Yet youth-led advocacy is consistently constrained by limited flexible funding, tokenistic inclusion in decision-making, and dependence on NGO structures that can restrict autonomous agenda-setting. Longitudinal follow-up over two years showed real […]