From Johannesburg to Lagos, from the Niger Delta to the townships of the Free State, women across Africa are building climate intelligence systems that challenge the monopoly of smoke giants on information and decision-making power. Yet, we cannot just label this resistance as environmental activism when they present us a fundamental reimagining of how knowledge, power and resources flow across the continent. Why, you might ask, should we read women’s climate intelligence as a feminist politics?  

To answer this question, I draw on the declaration of the African Feminist Forum during a meeting in Accra: ‘We define and name ourselves publicly as feminists because we celebrate our feminist identities and politics…By naming ourselves as feminists we politicize the struggle for women’s rights, we question the legitimacy of the structures that keep women subjugated.’  

They recognized African feminist struggles as ‘inextricably linked to our past as a continent, diverse pre-colonial contexts, slavery, colonization, liberation struggles, neocolonialism, globalization’ and in this context, climate exploitation and extractivism. When African women build independent climate intelligence systems, they continue this tradition of questioning illegitimate structures and transforming climate ‘reforms’ from a corporate asset into a continental tool for sovereignty.

In the Niger Delta, the legacy of Ogoni women who organized as the Federation of Ogoni Women (FOWA) in the 1990s provides a template for contemporary action. After farms failed and streams turned toxic from Shell’s operations, Ogoni women made a conscious decision to organize against the oil industry. Their activism helped oust Shell from Ogoniland and ultimately led to United Nations environmental reports demanding massive cleanup. This historical legacy shows women reframing climate narratives from community needs, not corporate spin.

But the lessons of Ogoniland extend beyond resistance to demonstrate how women’s environmental leadership creates new forms of knowledge that corporate and state actors cannot ignore. When Ogoni women documented oil spills using traditional ecological knowledge combined with community-based monitoring, they produced evidence that international bodies ultimately had to recognize. This model of women’s climate intelligence now scales across the continent.

What becomes obvious here is that the most sophisticated climate intelligence on the continent does not come from satellite feeds or corporate monitoring systems; it lives in the bodies and memories of African women. Farmers in Ghana’s northern regions can predict rainfall weeks before meteorological services. Oil spill survivors in the Niger Delta can diagnose water contamination by smell alone. This embodied knowledge represents a parallel intelligence network that multinational corporations and development agencies systematically ignore. Yet when properly mobilized, it becomes a weapon against corporate environmental control. 

I spoke with some of the on-the-ground climate activists working closely with these women to understand how climate intelligence reimagines their oppression, even as they continue to encounter insidious effects of colonial and capitalist environmental disruptions. Climate scholar, Susan Osaremeh Oyeribhor, for instance, discovered what official weather stations were missing during her Red Cross climate internship in Nigeria’s Sahel region. Temperatures were rising 1.5 times faster than global averages, but government records do not capture how this extreme heat devastates women farmers and market vendors who work outdoors. When Susan interviewed local women, they predicted heat patterns weeks ahead of meteorological services. This knowledge, ignored by policymakers, could boost community resilience if properly integrated into early warning systems.

In another instance, ecofeminist Onwuzuruike Chidera grew up in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, rinsing oil-blackened feet in saltwater and watching indigenous women call local radio stations to report spills in rapid-fire Pidgin English. These women understood exploitation’s syntax perfectly. They embodied climate intelligence in its rawest form, not filtered through seminars or conventions, but through everyday lived experiences and survival at the smack-centre of their oppression. 

In South Africa, community climate advocate, Sharon Mbonani, who grew up near Sasol’s Secunda plant recalled,  

When I contributed testimony to South Africa’s Life After Coal legal case in 2022, I carried this same tradition forward. Growing up in Secunda under Sasol’s toxic shadow, my family’s bodies became unwilling data collectors. My grandfather’s cancer, my baby’s death at one month old, my son’s respiratory issues that forced his relocation to Gureni, each tragedy generated evidence that no corporate environmental impact assessment would ever capture.

The legal victory in South Africa set national precedent for corporate accountability. It also revealed that personal grief, when systematically documented and collectively organized, becomes intelligence that corporations cannot dismiss or co-opt. The differential burden that African climate-exploited burden bears is a reflection of injustice that our participation must solely be hinged on our pain. This is the coloniality of environmental activism.  

In another case, the cookstove revolution led by Binta Yahaya’s story in Kaduna State demonstrates this intelligence in action. Realizing that using an open fire for cooking is like inhaling the smoke of 400 cigarettes every hour in one’s kitchen, or that smoke from firewood is the third leading cause of death among women and children in Nigeria, Yahaya tracked everything official surveys missed: stove adoption rates, household fuel spending, smoke-related illness patterns, hours saved from wood collection. Within a year, Yahaya scaled from village-level clean stove replacement to selling 15,000 units across sub-Saharan Africa powered by community-generated data that proved demand and impact. 

These unspoken stories resemble one truth: data control on climate intelligence is power. These women are refusing to remain passive recipients of external monitoring. Instead, they use their experiences to build their own evidence-based measurement systems and platforms for climate intelligence that serves African communities first. 

Yet this very injustice, the colonial-capital fetishization of our suffering, is being transformed by women who refuse to remain trapped permanently in testimonial roles within unchanged ‘green finance’ systems. African women are now leveraging that same embodied knowledge to institutionalize climate intelligence systems that operate beyond victim-witness testimony and are beginning to travel from community to corporate settings. From Nigerian legal advocates using the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act to South African environmental justice organizations, women-led firms across Africa are now compiling independent inventories of corporate emissions and holding oil companies accountable under new disclosure laws. They challenge carbon tax exemptions, frame data control as power and insist on their right to a seat at existing tables or the right to create different tables altogether.