A young climate fellow is taking the stories of the Lake Chad region to the world’s biggest climate meeting, on her first international trip. Msen Nabo will join COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, with her travel fully paid by the people who trained her.
She is one of 20 young people in the Lake Chad Climate Justice Youth Fellowship, run by the DEAN Initiative with African Climate Fellows and the Climate Justice Resilience Fund. Each fellow ran a small community project in Chad, Cameroon, Niger or Nigeria. Nabo says she will carry their results, and the voices of her ancestral home, into the talks. COP31 runs from 9 to 20 November 2026.
Here is the fellowship at a glance.
| Detail | What has been reported |
|---|---|
| Run by. | DEAN Initiative, a Nigerian non-profit working since 2010. |
| Partners. | African Climate Fellows and the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF). |
| Funding. | CJRF gave DEAN $200,000 over two years in 2024. |
| Fellows. | 20 young climate activists. |
| Length. | 24 months. |
| Countries. | Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria. |
| Seed grants. | $1,500 per fellow, as Nabo describes them. An earlier call put the figure at $2,000. |
| Perk. | Fully funded travel to global climate events. |
Why does this region matter at a climate summit? Lake Chad has lost more than 90% of its size since the 1960s, according to the CJRF. That shrinking has cut into fishing and farming, which many families rely on. It has also been linked to scarce resources, displacement and rising gender-based violence. The fellowship was built around that link. It trains young people to understand how climate change, insecurity and violence feed each other, and to speak up for change at home and on global stages.
It also trains them to tell their own stories. DEAN’s leader, Ngozi Edum, told the CJRF: “We really want the people to tell their story by themselves.” Doren Oho, a DEAN project officer, put it this way when the fellowship launched: “Our people are not voiceless. They’ve just been unheard.” A COP delegation is one way to change that.
Nabo’s announcement is personal. This is her first international trip, and she says she feels the weight of it. She says she carries the experiences of people in her ancestral home, who are threatened by climate-driven insecurity. She also carries the impact stories from the seed-grant projects that she and the 19 other fellows ran in their communities. By our sums, that is about 20 projects across four countries, each backed by a small grant.
Her own focus is the burden of care, which means the work of looking after children, the sick and older relatives. Nabo says she wants to listen, learn and speak with the right stakeholders about what climate change means for that burden in the Lake Chad region. She wants to keep the people most affected “at the heart of the solution.”
The summit she is joining is a big one. COP31 is hosted in Antalya, Türkiye, with Türkiye and Australia working together as the incoming presidency. The UN lists putting the Paris Agreement into practice and keeping the 1.5 degree Celsius goal within reach among its priorities. For young delegates from small communities, the main challenge is often getting heard in rooms full of officials. A fully funded seat is the first step.
The fellowship’s first call for applications closed in 2025. Nabo urges young people to follow DEAN Initiative for new programmes, fellowships and trainings. She notes that some can be reached from anywhere in Nigeria and across the continent. She also says she will share updates and lessons during COP31, whether or not people are in Türkiye.
Why it matters: Climate talks are often described in tonnes of carbon and billions of dollars. People at the lake see them differently, in lost fish, dry fields and unsafe roads. Small grants of about $1,500 will not fix that. But they show what young people can do with a little money and a lot of local knowledge. They also give delegates like Nabo real results to bring to the table. Programmes that pay for first-time travellers, and train them to tell their own stories, make African voices harder to ignore.
What to watch next: what Nabo and the other fellows say and share from Antalya, and which stakeholders they meet. Watch whether the summit’s final text mentions gender, care work or conflict-hit regions like Lake Chad. Watch for new calls from DEAN, African Climate Fellows or the CJRF for the next group of fellows. Watch whether the fellowship publishes results from the 20 community projects. And watch whether more African climate programmes follow the model of funding young delegates and community pilots together.
Sources: Announcement by Msen Nabo, Lake Chad Climate Justice Youth Fellow, on her COP31 delegation; Climate Justice Resilience Fund on Youth Voices for Climate Justice in Lake Chad; CJRF on the fellows telling their own stories; Legit.ng on the launch of the fellowship; UNFCCC on the road to COP31 in Antalya.
A note for startup founders: Don’t practice on investors. Practice on AI first. RaiseReady by Index Prima is an AI fundraising simulator for African founders: upload your pitch deck, get a readiness score and face a tough AI investor before the real meeting. Find this post, and every post we publish, at raiseready.indexprima.com.
