Krisztina Gyory
In the Mekong region, biodiversity hotspots and the communities that have been living in and taking care of these areas for centuries are facing a common challenge: harm caused by damaging development projects. The natural resources, cultures, traditions, and livelihoods of communities are at risk across the region. Mines are polluting rivers, power plants are contaminating lungs, dams are changing the natural flow of water systems, and forests are being cut down. These communities have done the least to accelerate climate change, but they are the ones that are impacted the most by harmful industrial development practices and the warming planet.
To counteract the impacts of harmful practices, activists and communities require tools and spaces that can help to strengthen networks and strategies for lasting change. As a response, EarthRights International opened the EarthRights School in 1999, offering a seven-and-a-half month residential training programme for up to 20 emerging leaders, environmental defenders, and human rights activists, from local communities in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Selected participants are committed to protecting their environment and ensuring their communities are meaningfully involved in decisions that will impact their ways of life, livelihoods, and environment.
Learning needs and challenges
Students learn about how development projects, such as dams, mines, power plants and special economic zones impact their natural environments, cultures and livelihoods. They get to know legal mechanisms they can use at national, regional and international levels to address the situation, engage in decision-making processes, hold corporations causing these harms accountable, and claim compensation and remedy. They also learn tools and skills of community engagement, awareness raising, leadership, networking, research and project management.
Such competencies have not been part of the curricula in the regular education systems they followed. During informal interviews, EarthRights School students have noted that information and learning resources about climate change are not available in their indigenous languages. They have also expressed difficulties with internet access, leaving them behind in the age of digital learning and social media. As they learn these skills and information at our school, they become multipliers, sharing and teaching it further in their communities and networks.
Many of our students are Indigenous, women, or of diverse genders, from remote areas, marginalised backgrounds and diverse educational environments. Our language of instruction, English, may be a third or fourth language that they have learned by themselves. They have often grown up exposed to constant threats, stressed and traumatised by a shrinking civic space, criminalisation, and conflict. Yet they are compelled by the urgency of finding solutions to protect their natural resources, while being forced to adapt to fast and unpredictable changes in their environments.
Our unique approach to learning in challenging contexts
These learning needs and contexts require us to design an inclusive learning process. To ensure that inclusivity is a cross-cutting feature of our programme, we create a safe environment in which people of different identities and backgrounds are free to express themselves. Building on the strengths of our students, we encourage peer learning and exchange, reinforced by input from experts and field practitioners. We use experiential learning such as role play, board games, outdoor adventure exercises, and video-making projects to engage students in hands-on, practical learning that can be applied to their contexts.
The programme bridges language and academic knowledge gaps, then builds new knowledge and skills step-by-step, reinforced through reflection and constructive feedback. We use illustrations and examples representing local people, settings and stories, case studies from the countries of our students, and support materials in Mekong languages to ensure accessibility. Our mentoring programme plays an essential role in providing needs-based mental health and emotional support, as well as enhancing language and study skills. The programme is reinforced by personalised support from alumni from students’ home countries, ensuring that everyone has a space to discuss and reflect in their own languages, as well as in English.
Our training programme is grounded in our continuous connection with the local communities and organisations that EarthRights partners with. Our teachers are community organisers, non-governmental and civil society organisation activists and field practitioners who successfully campaign and advocate for people’s rights to a clean and healthy environment. We don’t just learn from them in the classroom, but also during site study visits and field research projects. One of the most important sources of information for our ongoing curriculum improvement is the feedback and recommendations from students and alumni.
Our impact
To date, we have trained more than 600 environmental defenders through the EarthRights School. These defenders have gone on to found organisations, lead campaigns, and teach others how to protect their communities, their environment, and their ways of life. Our alumni have returned to the school as teachers and peer mentors and engage our fresh graduates in alumni networks and communities of practice.
We know that our collective power and potential can only be realised by working together to create inclusive education spaces with frontline communities where resources can be shared, and training efforts can be carried out with coherence and respect for their local realities and cultures.
If you would like to know more, share a resource or idea, please feel free to reach out to Krisztina Gyory at
krisztina@earthrights.org.