It was a simple but powerful truth spoken in Bijilo this week: our communities already know how to heal the environment. What they lack is the funding to do it at scale.
ChildFund The Gambia’s call for increased investment in community-led climate action should not be treated as just another appeal at another summit. It is a diagnosis of why The Gambia, despite planting millions of trees, still loses its mangroves, still watches its wetlands degrade, and still leaves its children more vulnerable to climate shocks.
As Acting Country Director Famara Darboe noted at the NGO Coalition for Social Development Summit, community-led initiatives work. Community forestry restores degraded land. Mangrove restoration protects our coast and fish stocks. School-based environmental programmes turn children from victims of climate change into guardians of the future.
ChildFund has proved it. Over 500,000 children supported. Livelihoods improved. Ecosystems restored. And it did not do it alone — it did it through Gambian partners, Gambian schools, and Gambian families.
So why are these successes still small, isolated, and fragile?
Because, as Darboe bluntly put it, “Communities demonstrate innovation and impact, but lack the resources necessary to expand sustainable models.”
This is the central contradiction of climate financing in The Gambia. Millions of dollars are pledged in conference halls for climate resilience, yet the women tending vegetable gardens in the Lower River, the youth groups nursing seedlings in the West Coast, and the 50 to 60 grassroots organisations under the Gambia Environment Alliance struggle to get a few thousand dalasis to sustain a borehole, a nursery, or a monitoring programme.
We agree with Momodou Enkeh Bah and Sulayman Njie: we must move beyond the photo-op of tree planting to the hard, unglamorous work of tree growing. A tree planted without follow-up is a press release, not a forest. Wetlands restored without community ownership will be degraded again next dry season.
What needs to change?first, fund differently. Donors, government and the private sector must shift from short-term project funding to long-term, flexible financing for community institutions. A three-month grant cannot grow a three-year mangrove.
Second, trust differently. ChildFund’s model of working through local partners shows that local organisations are not just implementers — they are innovators. They should be at the centre of climate planning, not at the margins.
Third, educate differently. As Green Earth is doing, climate action must be embedded in our classrooms, not as an extracurricular activity, but as civic education. When children plant a tree for their sponsor and learn to nurture it, they learn responsibility for the nation.
The climate crisis will not be solved in Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara International Conference Centre alone. It will be solved in Ghana Town’s wetlands, in the community gardens of Brikama, and in the schools where teachers are trained to teach environmental stewardship.
The solutions are community-led. The children who will inherit this land are ready.
It is time the money followed them.