A board game to engage Tunisian youth in climate challenges
Hivos
Climate change has a profound impact on youth in Tunisia, affecting their education, job opportunities, and living conditions. Water shortages and agricultural decline are forcing many young people to leave rural areas in search of work, while their exclusion from decision-making processes limits their ability to drive change. However, Tunisian Youth Impact (TYI) is working hard to shift the narrative. They developed an engaging climate board game to raise awareness among Tunisian youth and advocate for policy changes.
Climate Change in Tunisia
Tunisia is highly vulnerable to climate change. It’s facing severe water scarcity and increasing droughts that threaten agriculture and drinking water supplies. Soil degradation and desertification are endangering biodiversity and food security, while extreme heatwaves impact health and productivity. Rising sea levels pose a serious risk to coastal ecosystems and communities. Although the entire country is affected, it’s small-scale farmers, rural populations, and youth who are hardest hit as the resulting economic instability forces many to migrate in search of better opportunities.
While vulnerable communities struggle to access water, land, and environmental justice, many national climate policies and solutions fail to benefit them, further deepening socio-economic disparities.
Playfully Addressing Difficult Climate Knowledge
Tunisian Youth Impact (TYI) is an NGO founded in 2018 by young activists. Initially focused on governance and democracy, in 2021 the organisation expanded its mission under the Voices for Just Climate Action (VCA) programme to include sustainable development, with a particular emphasis on climate justice.
To make climate justice more accessible and engaging, TYI developed a climate board game that both entertains and teaches. Using the Tunisian dialect, the game covers themes like water scarcity, energy justice, biodiversity, food sovereignty, local climate activism, and access to environmental information. Players take turns in answering questions, completing challenges and fulfilling missions around climate change, water data and Tunisian ecosystems. Players collect discs, and the first player to collect eight discs – and place them on the board – wins the game.
While playing, young people acquire the knowledge and tools to engage in actual local decision-making processes. It also prepares them for community participation by facilitating discussions among young people, municipal authorities, and civil society actors. By translating complex climate issues into real-life scenarios, TYI trains youth—especially those from marginalised regions—to actively contribute to climate action discussions and propose local solutions.
Post-Project Engagement
The game has generated strong and sustained interest across Tunisia. TYI organises workshops featuring the game in collaboration with various organisations, scouting groups, schools, NGOs, and community centers. Ironically, at times extreme heatwaves reaching 53°C have forced some of them to be rescheduled. Nevertheless, the workshops have proven instrumental in raising awareness and fostering discussions on local climate challenges. The game’s popularity makes it very effective as an educational tool and underscores TYI’s successful approach to climate education and youth empowerment in Tunisia.
Advocating for Youth Participation
Tunisian Youth Impact (TYI) aims to expand its reach by developing an online version of the climate board game for digital learning throughout the country. This will enable TYI to further advocate for youth participation in national climate policies, collaborate with educational institutions to integrate climate justice into school curricula, and strengthen partnerships with local and international organizations to enhance youth-led climate action.
Read the original article on the Hivos website.
