Project
BetterLife Climate Leadership Academy
- Virtual, Uganda and across Africa
- With Moonshot
About the project
Climate negotiations can feel distant from the places already living with the consequences. The BetterLife Climate Leadership Academy helps young Africans understand those negotiations and connect them to what is happening in their own communities.
Participants learn about adaptation, climate finance, loss and damage, negotiations and advocacy. The academy also asks a more grounded question: what do these decisions mean for a farmer facing drought, a family displaced by floods or a young person trying to build a future?
Supported by Moonshot, the virtual academy brings together young people from Uganda and across Africa to learn from experts and one another.
WinnerMoonshot Borderless Award
Opening the Way for the Next Generation
When BetterLife International’s founder, Denise Ayebare, won the Moonshot Borderless Award, she wanted to turn that recognition into an opportunity for other young people.
Having begun her own leadership journey as a teenager and founded BetterLife at nineteen, Denise understood how much young people can achieve when someone takes their ideas seriously. She also recognised the barriers facing emerging climate leaders: limited access to mentorship, learning opportunities and the spaces where decisions about their future are made.
She wanted to extend her leadership by helping others develop theirs. That ambition helped shape the vision for the BetterLife Climate Leadership Academy: a place where young people could deepen their understanding of climate change, develop their ideas and build the confidence to lead.
The vision connects climate knowledge with the realities young people see around them, from failed harvests and food insecurity to displacement and limited livelihood opportunities. It makes room for young leaders whose experience begins in a farming community, a refugee settlement, a school or a neighbourhood, and whose ideas deserve the opportunity to grow.
For Denise, the next chapter of leadership is about opening that opportunity to others. Through the Academy, she wants to nurture a generation of young climate leaders equipped to organise, influence decisions and develop solutions alongside their communities.
From one leader to many
- Began leading as a teenager
- Founded BetterLife at nineteen
- Won the Moonshot Borderless Award
- Helped shape the vision for the Academy
- A generation of young climate leaders
From the project
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Support BetterLife Climate Leadership Academy
Stock a Green Library, equip an Eco Lab, mentor a hackathon team or sponsor young people to join the climate academy.