“No farmer will let his daughter leave home before sunrise — it’s not safe,” her father said as he stood beneath a mango tree, its deep roots anchored in the soil and its dark, glossy leaves shading the fragrant fruit Egypt exports to markets across Europe, Asia and the Gulf.
As heat waves intensify, farm owners have begun insisting that young women— including my daughter Safaa— start picking mangoes before dawn, fearing that rising temperatures will cause ripe fruit to fall and spoil.
“When we refused,” he said, “the girls were dismissed— and our families lost our only source of livelihood.”
Safaa’s story offers a glimpse of millions of workers across Africa whose livelihoods are being reshaped by climate change. Women and girls- the backbone of the agriculture workforce – bear disproportionate impacts while remaining largely invisible in official statistics.
Few reports capture this reality as clearly as the testimony shared by an Egyptian farmer during an International Labour Organization (ILO) focus group in October 2023 on the impact of climate change on women agricultural workers.
His story of losing their income following the 2023 North Africa heatwave serves as a reminder of the human dimension behind climate data.
Africa is the most vulnerable continent to climate change despite contributing the least to global emissions.
Temperatures have risen by roughly 0.3°C per decade, with North Africa warming even faster.
The year 2023 was the hottest ever recorded, with global temperatures reaching 1.45°C above pre-industrial levels.
This contributed to a 10 per cent decline in cereal production across North Africa- with Tunisia experiencing the sharpest drop- while water scarcity, rapid desertification, and soaring heat are threatening agriculture, energy, tourism, and public health.
These climate challenges coincide with severe socioeconomic pressures.
Arab states and North Africa youth unemployment remains high 24.4 percent in 2023—among the highest rates globally—and young women remain the most affected, according to the ILO report on global employment trends for youth 2024. Informal employment continues to expand, and social protection systems remain fragmented, covering only 19.1 percent of Africans.
As highlighted in the ILO’s World Social Protection Report 2024-2026, these gaps undermine resilience and limit countries’ capacity to manage recurring shocks. In 2022 alone, 110 million people in Africa were affected by climate related disasters.
Yet despite an estimated need of $2.8 trillion for climate adaptation and mitigation between 2020 and 2030, the continent receives only 2 percent of global climate finance.
This month, thousands of leaders, diplomats and. activists are gathering in Belém, Brazil, for the Cop30 climate summit- a pivotal moment for global climate action.
The ILO underscores that the world of work sits at the heart of the climate crisis, and that effective climate action must integrate social and economic dimensions. A just transition—rooted in decent work, social protection, social dialogue among governments, employers and workers organizations, and fundamental labour rights—is essential to guiding policymaking toward social justice.
Environmental transformation cannot be fair or sustainable if it comes at the expense of workers’ rights or the livelihoods of vulnerable and marginalized communities.
African Worker’s Organizations believe Cop30 presents an important opportunity to anchor just transition principles more effectively into national and global policies.
They stress that a transition to low-carbon economies should generate decent jobs, expand social protection, and promote inclusive development grounded in tripartism, social dialogue, collective bargaining, and freedom of association.
Delivering on this vision, they argue, requires a renewed commitment to ensuring that no one is left behind.
The African labour movement has set priorities to guide the process, each directly addressing the vulnerability exposed by Safaa’s story.
Workers are calling for firm commitments to financing just-transition measures within the New Quantified Climate-Finance Goal, including dedicated resources for social protection, skills development, green-job creation, and decent work.
They emphasize that private-sector engagement should operate within transparent, rights-based frameworks that safeguard labour standards.
They also call for establishing a coordinated global mechanism for a just transition—through the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) and the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap—to connect national efforts and ensure that developing countries receive the financing and technical support required to shift toward low-carbon economies.
Workers’ organizations stress the importance of formal union representation within this mechanism to promote transparency and accountability.
Another key demand is strengthening social protection systems across Africa through sustainable and equitable financing mechanism, such as progressive taxation, expanded social-insurance contributions, and increased international climate finance for countries with limited fiscal space.
Governments are encouraged to integrate climate impacts into actuarial analyses and costing scenarios, to link disaster-risk financing to national social-protection strategies, while ensuring the portability of benefits—particularly for people displaced by climate-related shocks.
Workers also call for embedding just transition principles in national climate strategies, particularly in the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs 3.0) due in 2025. Ther argus that NDCs should serve as investment roadmaps for poverty reduction and green job creation, with social protection recognized as a core adaptation measure.
Additionally, they emphasize the need to operationalize the United Nations Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP), launched at COP27 in Egypt, with a stronger social dimension anchored in international labour standards—especially the ILO Tripartite Consultation Convention (No. 144).
This includes ensuring the inclusion of women, informal workers, migrants, youth, refugees, and persons with disabilities.
Workers further highlight the importance of embedding social and economic indicators into the Global Goal on Adaptation and national adaptation plans to measure how climate adaptation affects jobs, occupational safety, freedom of association, enterprise resilience, and equitable access to finance.
They stress that gender justice should be central to just-transition framework, through strong gender-responsive climate strategies aligned with ILO standards on maternity protection, family responsibilities, equal pay, and non-discrimination.
They also advocate for investing in the care economy, guided by the 5R framework—recognizing, reducing, redistributing, rewarding, and representing care work. Such investment would create green jobs, strengthen gender-responsive social protection, and ensure women’s participation in just-transition governance, aligned with the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda.
Workers call for aligning trade and investment policies with just transition agenda, ensuring that climate finance and sustainable foreign investment support decent-work commitments and social dialogue.
They recognize the essential participation of vulnerable groups- including informal workers and local communities- in advancing social justice within climate policy, and they call for the ILO Global Coalition for Social Justice to serve as a platform for embedding these principles.
Ultimately, workers’ organizations are urging all parties to commit to a “Decade of Social Justice for Climate and Decent Work.”
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*The Writer is Wafaa Abdelkader, Specialist in Workers Activities for North Africa, International Labour Organisation.
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