A Year of Grassroots Movement Building: Read our 2024-2025 Annual Report
A look into our work and impacts over the past year
In 2019, a small group of dedicated South African youth and older allies connected through social media and organized Cape Town's first major climate protest in just three weeks. What began as a grassroots movement quickly evolved into the African Climate Alliance (ACA), as we recognised the need for an Afrocentric approach to climate activism. Five years on, our organisation has seen much change, challenges and progress.
Being half a decade in prompts much reflection. And whilst more change and development are on the horizon, one thing will always remain steadfast: our commitment to being a movement-based organisation that strives to stay connected to the grassroots and serve African youth.
Over the last five years we have always kept our aspiration — and the vision of the school youth who helped found ACA — in mind to build towards youth-led climate alliances across Africa. But being based in Cape Town and having a small team with limited resources has sometimes made this challenging – and perhaps a slower process than the original school youth may have hoped. That being said, we have expanded our network presence into dozens of countries on the continent and have graduated ambassadors in more than 10 countries. In 2025, we will be deepening this work even further and starting to expand our solidarity outside of South Africa in more meaningful ways.
Although 2024 presented its share of challenges, it was a year of significant growth and deepened understanding of our positioning. We emerged with a more profound perspective on our impact and clearer vision for our future direction. Most importantly, we continue to draw connections between climate and social justice.
As we enter our next chapter, we're strengthening our commitment to Afrocentricity by strategically increasing our presence in key countries where our Ambassador and youth networks are already thriving. This focused approach will be driven by meaningful collaborations — within our team, with our Ambassadors, and with aligned partner organisations — as we continue to reshape the climate justice narrative toward social justice and equity.
While our roots are in protest, we're adapting our organising strategies while keeping climate literacy and collaboration at the center of all we do.
2024 was a year of movement building:
We took the government to court to fight for our future in the first youth-led climate change court case in South African history – and we won. In the landmark ‘Cancel Coal’ ruling, the High Court of South Africa has overturned the government’s plans to add 1,500 MW of new coal-fired power to the national grid. This will have far-reaching implications for ensuring young people are included in policy making that impacts their future.
We hosted our third March for System Change mass mobilisation in Cape Town, in line with Human Rights Day in South Africa. Plus, for the first time, our Ambassadors in Malawi and Zimbabwe hosted 6 decentralised actions in line with our March for System Change messaging.
We hosted the first-ever Cape Town Climate Concert as a way to bring people together to celebrate the progress that has been made in our collective work for a better world, and to showcase the power of art as a medium for shifting narratives of the climate crisis – aligning with our ongoing work to emphasise that there is room for everybody in this movement.
We hosted the third annual Cape Town Climate Week with five days of impactful events, discussions, and community engagements across the city. Each day we collaborated with different partner organisations, illustrating to our attendees that the movement for climate justice is deeply interwoven with other social issues and that there are many ways to get be part of the movement.
We established new partnerships with aligned organisations to deepen our intersectional approach and commitment to human-centred climate solutions – showing the connections between climate justice, energy, water, food, land and housing, gender inequities, and global systems of oppression.
Our work was covered widely in local and international media.
We further established ourselves as an organisation that offers a gathering point for activists from across the continent to connect, share, and strengthen their movement-building skills through our Activist Gatherings, Solidarity Picnic, and Africa’s Youth Voices conference series.
We launched the African Climate Alliance podcast as an extension of our storytelling work that aims to shift hearts and minds.
