Blog: Agnes Kola, Coordinator of Women’s Rights programme, visits Ireland

September 15, 2018

Agnes Kola, who is ActionAid’s National Women’s Rights Coordinator in Kenya, visited Ireland in September 2019 to share successes from the work on the ground.

Agnes has been instrumental in leading ActionAid’s Women’s Rights Programme in Kenya which is funded by Irish Aid, that has seen a huge improvement to the lives of some of the world’s poorest women and their communities.

During her visit she attended the International Congress of Parliamentary Women’s Caucuses on 9-10 September 2018 in Dublin Castle. She also spoke at two ActionAid events in Dublin and Cork, where she updated supporters and the public on how their generous donations are changing the lives of communities in Kenya.

Agnes Kola and Siobhán McGee, CEO ActionAid, attend the International Congress of Parliamentary Women’s Caucuses — Agnes Kola and Siobhán McGee, CEO ActionAid Ireland, attend the International Congress of Parliamentary Women’s Caucuses

Here is Agnes’s blog from her week in Ireland:

My visit to Ireland was very insightful in many ways. I attended the International Congress of Parliamentary Women’s Caucuses 2018 – a landmark meeting bringing together caucuses from 45 countries in the world and my country Kenya participated but not as much as I would have loved to see. I would have loved to see the leaders there from the Kenya Women’s Parliamentary Association (KEWOPA).

The aim of the conference was to take stock on how the caucuses have performed over time in terms of influencing the spaces they are in and sharing the challenges they face. It was good to see the amount of progress that women in politics have made and to realise there is still a lot that we as civil society can do to support them within that space, to make caucuses effective. Some countries did not have caucuses at all, most are not well resourced and still face challenges on how they can meet and push for their issues. My take home is that ActionAid Kenya will reach out to KEWOPA with lessons from countries like Pakistan and Tanzania to help them to be able to re-strategise and focus on issues that will bring change in the lives of women and girls.

We also had a productive meeting with Irish Aid who fund the Women’s Rights programme, who had great interest in our new programme and generally in what is happening in countries. Our new Behaviour Change approach is very critical, for me it could act a gamechanger because of its uniqueness and ability to bring in results that are far reaching.

I also attended and spoke at ActionAid’s public event ‘From Kenya to Cork – Women’s Empowerment’ in Cork. It enabled me to see how lessons can be drawn from either direction especially from ActionAid Kenya’s work on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)- we have consistently worked on FGM in Kenya and AAIreland has been able to pick what has worked in Kenya to build a strong programme with migrants in Ireland.

The testimonies of graduates from the programme in Cork made me realise that women across the world, regardless of where they are, face a huge amount of marginalisation, exclusion and abuse. Therefore our strategic direction in ActionAid is important to be able to help them overcome those issues, using lessons from Kenya and Ireland and other programme countries. We need to continually deepen our analysis so that our initiatives speak to the real issues that women face.

It was a pleasure to meet with some of ActionAid’s child sponsors and supporters who made me realise how humble people collectively have been able to support in great projects across the world and we shouldn’t take it for granted that they are giving generously and our accountability should be to ensure that every cent they give goes towards making the lives of our communities better.

I am thankful to AAIreland for organising the visit and enabling me to see a cross section of their work- projects in Ireland, child sponsorship, donors- it helps me to be able to see the vision of AAIreland and AAKenya’s contribution to enabling its success.

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.