Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim is a Chadian environmental activist and geographer. She is the Coordinator of the Association of Peul Women and Autochthonous Peoples of Chad (AFPAT) and served as the co-director of the pavilion of the World Indigenous Peoples’ Initiative and Pavilion at COP21, COP22 and COP23.

Activism and advocacy

Ibrahim is an environmental activist working on behalf of her people, the Mbororo in Chad. She was educated in Chad's capital city of N'Djamena and spent her holidays with the indigenous Mbororo people, who are traditionally nomadic farmers, herding and tending cattle. During the course of her education, she became aware of the ways in which she was discriminated against as an indigenous woman and also of the ways in which her Mbororo counterparts were excluded from the educational opportunities she received. So in 1999, she founded the Association of Indigenous Peul Women and Peoples of Chad (AFPAT), a community-based organization focused on promoting the rights of girls and women in the Mbororo community and inspiring leadership and advocacy in environmental protection. The organization received its operating license in 2005 and has since participated in international negotiations on climate, sustainable development, biodiversity, and environmental protection.

Her focus on environmental advocacy stemmed from her firsthand experience of the effects of global climate change on the Mbororo community, who rely on natural resources for their own survival and for the survival of the animals they care for. For years, they have been experiencing the effects of Lake Chad drying up; the lake is a vital source of water for people from Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and is now 10% of its size from the 1960s. In a written testimony to the International Organization for Migration, Ibrahim emphasized that her people, and indigenous communities like her own, are "direct victims of climate change," which has worked to displace them, forcing them to abandon their own lands in search of ones that can sustain their way of life. In that testimony, she also spoke of the consequences of climate change migration, which disproportionately leaves migrant communities vulnerable.

Ibrahim has written on the importance of recognizing indigenous people's rights when crafting global climate change for a variety of outlets, including Quartz and the World Economic Forum's Agenda. Of particular concern to Ibrahim is the legal right of indigenous peoples to own and manage the lands where they live. Such legal rights guarantee that indigenous community have legal agency in economic developments that might displace them, such as oil drilling projects, mining, and hydropower plants.

Ibrahim has worked collaboratively with UNESCO and the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) on a project to 3D map Chad's Sahel desert region, where 250,000 Mbororos currently live, relying on subsistence farming. The project combined 3D mapping technologies with indigenous scientific knowledge to develop a tool to sustainably manage the environment and empower indigenous voices—particularly those of women—to make decisions on planning for a future of climate adaptation and mitigation. Ibrahim in her December 2019 TED talk on the impact of climate change said that while creating the 3D mapping Ibrahim was able to bring in women's voices into the decision-making and also give the men their respect as accorded by her tradition. Women were able to identify where they gathered the medicine and where they collected food which the men agreed to by nodding their heads. and explained how our grandmother can tell about the weather forecast, animal immigration, size of fruit, and behaviours of her own cattle by observing her environment. In an interview with BBC
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