Truth Alliance was formed as a coalition by activists who saw their public interest work being quietly undone, for decades, by an illegal cost/benefit model that uses manufactured numbers and a false premise to allow some to benefit at deadly cost to others
While the Alliance centers the African experience given the unique threat and losses, telling the truth that no child should have ever been valued more than another is a form of social change many in the Global Majority engage in, including representatives from the United States, Morocco, Bangladesh, India, and Latin America.
Insisting on Justice. Restoring Equity. Centering African Lives.
No Child is Worth More than Others
The Tell the Truth (TTT) Campaign is an African feminist-led movement born from a simple but powerful belief: every African life matters, from birth.
Insisting on Justice. Restoring Equity. Centering African Lives.
The Tell the Truth campaign
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Background
African women and children contribute almost nothing to the climate crisis—yet they suffer its harshest blows:
Crops fail.
Families are displaced.
Children go hungry and miss school.
Futures are stolen.
The injustice runs deeper than the climate crisis itself. For generations, African lives have been counted as less—discounted in aid budgets, erased in harm assessments, and reduced to numbers rather than seen as human beings with rights and dignity.
The Tell the Truth Campaign rises to confront this silence. Guided by African feminists and global justice allies, it links climate justice, reproductive justice, and decolonial feminist leadership into a single call: measure harm truthfully, without bias, without excuses.
Why This Matters
Because justice must begin at birth.
Because no child should be treated as expendable.
Because the future of Africa depends on telling the truth today.
This campaign is not only about advocacy. It is about rewriting the rules of justice so that they finally recognize the full worth of every African life.
Our Launch Strategy
We are starting strong, with:
✅ a bold petition to the ACHPR demanding honest harm assessments.
✅ Coalition building with African and global partners.
✅ Media campaigns to amplify silenced voices.
✅ Public mobilization so that truth-telling becomes unstoppable.
Fact:
Colonization not only extracted Africa’s natural and human resources but also systematically dismantled the indigenous systems of governance that centered around women’s leadership,collective responsibility, and care-based community planning. One of the most profound long-term consequences was the disruption of women-led care circles, which historically guided decisions on fertility, child-rearing, and community health.These traditional African systems, many of which were matrilineal or communal, prioritized child well-being and ecological balance, embedding birth decisions within society’s moral,environmental, and spiritual fabric. The imposition of colonial legal and economic systems replaced this care ethic with patriarchal, individualistic models that incentivized population growth for labour exploitation and undermined the collective authority of African women.This structural erasure of women’s roles in reproductive governance directly contributed to the rise of unsustainable population policies and inequitable birth outcomes. It disconnected family planning from values of intergenerational justice, community consensus, and ecological stewardship.
Today, initiatives like the Rejoice Africa Foundation in Uganda are modelling a return to this tradition through care-based planning, community savings schemes, and child-centered agricultural practices. By anchoring reproductive health and food systems in collective action and maternal leadership, Rejoice demonstrates a scalable Afrocentric model of feminist restoration. It recognizes that empowering women to lead in matters of birth and care is not only a cultural right, but also a pathway to ecological sustainability and intergenerational justice.
This petition calls on the African Commission to formally recognize the need to acknowledge the role colonization played in displacing traditional women-led governance structures.
Problem:
Any value/impact assessment or claim made today is likely out of context because it will ignore children entering the world in vastly inequitable conditions as a key factor impacting the veracity of the claim. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equity / equitywashing, or the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some children at deadly cost others, and exacerbates the climate and decline of democracy crises. Equitywashing derives from the fundamental subversion of racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century through policies that privatized family planning and thus the fundamental creation of power relations, rather than making the process equitable or empowering.
We can see these systems at work by asking the question above, relative to hard metrics like measurable self-determination and political equity. For example, recent litigation against Coca-Cola shows the illegal discounting of future children and animals’ lives was the largest driver of the harms. The case shows decades of performative environmentalists disenfranchising persons of color, and using metrics for “green” designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others.
Today, initiatives like the Rejoice Africa Foundation in Uganda are modelling a return to this tradition through care-based planning, community savings schemes, and child-centered agricultural practices. By anchoring reproductive health and food systems in collective action and maternal leadership, Rejoice demonstrates a scalable Afrocentric model of feminist restoration. It recognizes that empowering women to lead in matters of birth and care is not only a cultural right, but also a pathway to ecological sustainability and intergenerational justice.
This petition calls on the African Commission to formally recognize the need to acknowledge the role colonization played in displacing traditional women-led governance structures.
The fix?
There is a process that simply asks those making value and impact claims to admit they started their work with a standard of zero functional protections for infants and animals because that would have required minimal equity thresholds for birth and development conditions for all children. We then urge those on whom we focus to change their approach by making the admissions, and taking a variety of other steps. We have leverage in the form of public shaming given the way this omission enriched some at deadly cost to others, legal actions for fraud, the peer-influence of certification programs, collective family planning / grassroots community formation ensuring delayed parenting so that no child is born beneath a line of self-determination and the resources they need to be so – what we might call the legitimacy line., etc.
Template ask:
. _________ claims __________, but relative to what? It appears _________’s claimed value add does not account for political inequity, which is caused by our all treating children of color as deserving of less that white children, something that has for decades slowly disenfranchised them. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing X’s claimed value add, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent. For example______________. Use of that standard means actively harming while slowly disenfranchising persons of color. Choose the Fair Start standard instead. Freedom is universal democratic empowerment, not exploiting arbitrary but massive differences in birth positionality and empowerment.
Join Us
The Truth Alliance invites you to stand with us. Together, we can Tell the Truth, demand justice, and ensure that every African child is valued not as a statistic, but as a full human being.
Donate today to power this campaign.
Partner with us to build a global coalition for equity and accountability
Truth matters. Equity matters. Lives matter
Together, let’s tell the Truth