Most people treat climate change and conflict as separate problems.
One is an environmental crisis. The other is a human one. They get different budgets, different departments, different solutions.
But in the communities Search for Common Ground works in, they arrive together. Climate shocks deepen inequality, strain shared resources, and light the fuse on tensions that were already there.
And the people who feel that pressure first — who carry both the economic and caregiving burdens when things get harder — are almost always women.
In Buramata, northwestern Burundi, that pressure had a name: deforestation.
Climate change, housing expansion, and population growth had created a critical shortage of wood for cooking charcoal. A resource communities had always depended on was disappearing. And with it, livelihoods, stability, and the fragile trust that holds neighbors together.
The conventional response would have been only to manage the shortage.
Georgette and the Garukirabakenyezi cooperative found a different answer.
They turned leftover rice harvest residues — material everyone else considered waste — into cooking briquettes. A practical, eco-friendly alternative that didn’t require cutting another tree. What had been thrown away became a source of income, energy, and independence.
That shift wasn’t just environmental. It was social.
When women earn their own income, something changes in how they’re seen, and in how they see themselves. Financial independence creates the credibility and confidence to lead, to speak, and to be heard in the decisions that shape community life.
“Men no longer consider women’s work secondary,” Georgette says.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the foundation of sustainable peace.
Because lasting peace isn’t built by outsiders with solutions. It’s built by people already in the community — who understand its pressures, carry its burdens, and refuse to wait for someone else to solve what they can solve themselves.
In Burundi, the women didn’t wait.
They turned waste into fuel. And fuel into power.
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