Junior Experts encourage climate awareness initiatives at Enabel

Four Junior Experts who started working for Enabel in the first half of 2023 (Cynthia, Thierry, Magali and myself) decided to build our Global Citizenship Education initiative around climate awareness. Climate change is one of the current global challenges and action needs to be taken on every level – from the individual, to the organizational, national and international level. It is inherently linked with the sector of international cooperation, hence we think Enabel has to play an active role in this domain – not only through its programs and projects, but also taking responsibility as an organisation and employer.

As a first step towards launching green initiatives at Enabel in Rwanda, creating awareness about climate change among colleagues was crucial to attract everyone’s commitment. To this end, we conducted “Climate Fresk” workshops.

The Climate Fresk is a methodology that is being used worldwide and the 3-hour workshop consists of 4 phases. In a first phase, participants learn in a playful and collaborative way about the science of climate change by arranging cards in a cause-consequence order. In a second phase, participants get creative in order to make a “fresk” (an artwork) out of the card game, which is aimed at better processing the information.

Afterwards emotions are discussed, as the topic of climate change often brings a different range of feelings among the participants (defeat, stress, sadness, powerlessness, frustration, anger, apathy, …). The last phase is dedicated to collectively coming up with actions on an individual/organisational/political level and is intended to spark the participants’ motivation to take action against climate change.

The four Junior Experts conducted Climate Fresk workshops for all 126 Enabel Rwanda staff, divided into about 15 separate groups. Other colleagues are encouraged to follow the facilitator’s training so they can conduct the workshop for new staff as part of their onboarding in Rwanda. Furthermore, in order to inspire other Junior Experts to spread climate awareness in their respective countries, we organised two Climate Fresk workshops during the regional meeting with Juniors Experts based in East-Africa (February 2025).

As part of our “green mission”, we also established the Climate Champions Community – a group of colleagues motivated to work on climate initiatives at Enabel Rwanda. This community was later absorbed into the Climate Circle at Enabel in Rwanda. With the Junior Experts we identified different domains in which to take action (transport & mobility; waste management; energy use; digital waste; green procurement; water). We intended to launch an internal awareness campaign, with an email newsletter containing infographics per topic (e.g. the impact of energy use and how to minimise energy use at the office) as well as a concrete activity for each domain (e.g. under the topic of waste management: organise a “repair café” to fix broken items rather than discarding them).

Also the installation of a natural water filter at the Representation office is planned (this filter transforms tap water into safe drinking water and hence reduces the amount of plastic water bottles and minimises the ecological impact of transporting water), as well as the creation of a Green Procurement Guide that integrates ecological considerations into our procurement policy.

With our actions we hope to have infected the Enabel colleagues in Rwanda with the “green microbe” and to have sparked the start of a continuous green consciousness at our Rwandan offices.