Social Impact for a Greener Future

Developer

SoGreen – Social Impact for a Greener Future

Address: Grundarstigur 9, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland

About
SoGreen is a startup with a big heart and an even bigger ambition: A world where all girls realise their right to education and climate justice is placed at the heart of all climate action. SoGreen channels climate finance from the Global North to the Global South by generating carbon credits through girls’ education. Sogreen is passionate about Gender Equality and about the Environment.

Contact
Guðný Nielsen, Co-founder and CEO
gudny@sogreen.is
+354 7791308
www.sogreen.is

Get in touch

Sogreen is available for collaborations. If you want to chat about the project, don’t hesitate in reaching out.

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Background

The climate solution Girls’ Education is founded on its strong and consistent connection to moderate fertility rates. A smaller population, in turn, results in a reduction in carbon emissions.
Although higher educational attainment can, in some situations, be strongly associated with higher consumption, this is not the case for people living in extreme poverty in low and lower middle income countries. There, girls’ secondary education is first and foremost associated with lower risks of marrying as a child and giving birth before the age of 18. “If universal secondary education were achieved, child marriage could be virtually eliminated, and the prevalence of early childbearing could be reduced by up to three-fourths since early childbearing goes hand in hand with child marriage “(World Bank, 2018). Furthermore, an essential factor for differences in population projections is “future female educational attainment, with higher attainment leading to lower fertility rates and therefore decreased population growth up to a level of 1 billion people by 2050 “(IPCC, 2018). The size of populations undeniably impacts global consumption and, therefore, emissions.

The project – aim, and objective

For the purpose of this project, the future demographic evolution and carbon emissions of a representative sample of the Zambian rural population are simulated based on the well-established relationship between fertility and female educational attainment and using official Demographic and Health Survey data. Avoided emissions are quantified by comparing the emissions under a Baseline scenario, in which the pathways of girls’ education follow past trends, and an Intervention scenario, in which a given percentage of adolescent girls complete secondary education.
In most countries, ensuring children’s access to primary and secondary education requires payments for school requisites, such as school fees, books, writing instruments, school uniforms, etc. In communities where people live in extreme poverty, many households are too poor to afford these. As a consequence, millions of children don’t receive an education. The number of girls who should be in primary and secondary school but are not is estimated at 129 million worldwide (UNICEF, 2022).
The project provides necessary requisites to ensure girls’ access to secondary education, as well as psychosocial support specifically designed to empower girls and increase awareness of their rights as well as knowledge on sexual and reproductive health.
A dual monitoring system is carried out via official school records at the end of each semester and annual spot checks at the community level to verify project participants’ school attendance and completion rate.
The benefits of education go well beyond climate impact. Co-benefits of the project include:
Enhancement of human rights, namely the right to education and protection from the human rights violations that are child marriage and adolescent pregnancy.

Project

The project boundary is communities in the Monze district of Zambia, belonging to the school districts of the schools Moonzwe, Keemba, Chisekesi, and Hamapande. The project will ensure girls’ access to education in already existing school facilities, i.e., no school buildings will be constructed by the project. Project participants are girls at the secondary education age level (around 14-18 years) who, with the project’s support, would be able to access secondary education and graduate.

The project contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals:

3 Good Health and Wellbeing

Education also has an incredible impact on health. As rates of child marriages and early-teen pregnancies go down, so do infant and maternal mortality rates. Educated mothers tend to be more informed about nutrition and healthcare, incl. vaccination, so their children are usually healthier. Increasing girls’ education has positive effects on infant and child health. A child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to survive past the age of 5 than a child born to an illiterate woman. A gender-responsive comprehensive sexuality education programme is part of Zambia’s secondary-school curriculum.

4 Education for all

Education opens up life-changing opportunities for children. For girls in low-income countries, who often have even fewer opportunities than boys, education is crucial as it provides them with knowledge and awareness of their rights, leading to their empowerment and ability to fulfill their ambition.

5 Gender equality Targets

Education helps discourage harmful cultural practices rooted in inequitable gender norms marked by strong negative stereotypes about women, whose roles are often limited to raising children and household chores. Moreover, girls in school are much less likely to be victims of early and forced child marriage.

8 Decent work and economic growth

Girls’ education strengthens economies and reduces inequalities as educated women are more likely to participate in the formal labor market. Poverty goes down as more resilient societies allow all individuals to fulfill their potential.

10 Reduced inequalities

By ensuring girls’ education in poor and marginalized communities, the project works to tackle the discriminatory practice of prioritizing boys’ education. By increasing resource flows for development to countries where the need is greatest, particularly least developed countries.

13 Climate Action

Not only is increasing girls’ education a mitigation measure, but it is also an adaptation measure as “for every additional year of schooling a girl receives on average, her country’s resilience to climate disasters can be expected to improve by 3.2 points (as measured by the ND-GAIN Index, which calculates a country’s vulnerability to climate change in relation to its resilience)”—mobilizing financial flows to address the needs of least developed countries in the context of meaningful mitigation action.

Summary

Project operation start
2023
First vintage
2027

First project mitigation estimation
7,360 tCO2-e/yr

Location
Monze district, Zambia

Consultation

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