Nature Solutionaries Veronika Perkova

When Ayesha Amin, a renowned Pakistani women’s
rights activist, first saw a condom in a workshop, she refused to touch it.



“I felt so embarrassed that I just wanted to disappear,” she says. Her shame, however, turned into curiosity and this moment helped Amin realize that talking about sex and reproduction shouldn’t be taboo.



In 2018, Amin founded the nonprofit Baithak:
Challenging Taboos, which has reached 300,000 women across Pakistan with workshops on family planning, menstrual health and gender-based violence.


Having witnessed one of the worst climate disasters in Pakistan’s history, Amin has also been a fierce advocate for climate policies that address the needs of
young girls and women.



Together we talk about


her dogged persistence to
never stop dreaming
her daring acts of resistance to patriarchal norms
dismantling harmful menstruation myths
and about why there has to be more
than just 2 women out of 50 men in climate meetings.

 

To learn more about Ayesha Amin’s work, check out Baithak’s website, Baithak’s Instagram account or Amin’s Linkedin profile.

 

TIP: Help de-stigmatize menstruation by talking
about it with your close ones.

Even though child marriage might seem like a thing of the past for some of us, one in five girls globally are still married off under the age of 18.

This means that for millions of these child brides, their childhood, education and future have been stolen forever. Uneducated women often end up having worse health and economic outcomes and their families are more vulnerable to climate change.

To free girls from this nightmarish practice, Ugandan activist Joan Kembabazi has been challenging traditional beliefs in her community and advocating for girls‘ education and empowerment.

In this interview, Joan talks about why child marriage happens, what it‘s like to be a child bride and what needs to be done to eliminate this practice.

Joan Kembabazi is the Founder & CEO of the Gufasha Girls Foundation. She campaigns against child marriage and advocates for girls‘ education in rural communities in central Uganda and beyond.

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If we truly want to liberate women, access to contraception is just the tip of the iceberg. We also need to feel comfortable talking about our bodies, our sexuality and sensuality, menstruation, post-partum depression, parental burnout and menopause. Because if we feel ashamed or embarrassed about these topics, we’re still being repressed.

That’s just one of many life lessons that Nadine Goodman has learned over the last 40 years running CASA, an impactful nonprofit that helps 80,000 people in central Mexico push reproductive health and rights forward every year. In this revealing interview, we talk about what needs to happen for women to be truly liberated and why it’s a good idea to take a holistic view of the health and well-being of women, whole communities, and the environment.

To have a large family, and at least one son, are such strong cultural and religious norms in Nigeria that when women don’t meet them they’re often considered failures. Not only is this unfair to women, it’s also becoming nearly impossible to provide for a big family in Nigeria, where poverty is rampant and the cost of living has recently tripled. 

Chidera Benoit, a teacher and Executive Director of ⁠Population Explosion Awareness Initiative⁠, explains why it’s essential to change harmful patriarchal norms, broaden access to voluntary family planning and open up a conversation about sustainable population in Nigeria whose population is expected to double in the next two decades. 

Imagine that you were a 14-year old girl, and instead of chatting with friends or monitoring Instagram, you’d be married off to an elderly man and expected to run a household.

Imagine that you gave birth to your first child, a cute baby girl, and instead of receiving cheerful reactions, people would start crying and feeling sorry for you. 

Imagine that throughout your lifetime you would have to give birth to 9 children, undergo several miscarriages and see a few of your children die. 

THIS is not just a bad dream. It’s a daily reality for many girls and women in the northwestern region of Pakistan where men rule with an iron fist and where women aren’t even aware of their rights. In this revealing interview, two human rights activists from The Awakening, Erfaan Hussein Babak and Neelum Rahim, share their experiences of breaking taboos and empowering women in a strictly patriarchal society.

800,000 native trees. This is how many seeds of hope conservationists from Brazilian nonprofit REGUA have planted on degraded lands in the Atlantic Forest over the last two decades  – one of the biologically richest forests in the world. And that’s not all!

The dedicated team managed to buy land that once used to be a farm and patch up fragmented pieces of forests to create an 11,000 hectare nature reserve. In this interview, Micaela Locke, the Research and Communications Coordinator at REGUA, talks about land restoration, native tree reforestation, building
corridors for wildlife, reintroducing tapirs, and safeguarding a vital watershed for 2.5 million people in Rio de Janeiro.