“She’s Not Here”

If I could have one wish today,
It would be for silence to speak,
To scream through hollow stomachs,
Through empty classrooms,
Through dreams crushed under the weight of storms they didn’t create.

Look around.
This room is full—of voices, of power, of plans.
But she’s not here.
That girl.
The one who hasn’t gone to school in over a year.
The one whose thirst has outlasted the days she’s counted.
The one whose voice is a whisper, drowned out by floods,
Buried beneath droughts.

She’s not here.
She’s not at this table.
She’s not at this conference.
She’s not hearing the decisions made for her life.
But I am.

I am here.
And though my power is small, my voice is loud.
This stage is hers through me.
This mic, these words—they belong to her.
So listen closely.

We have talked.
We have talked so much,
The echoes of our words have filled these halls,
But her silence—it screams.
Through the cracks of empty schools,
Through the hunger that gnaws louder than any speech,
Through the disasters that flash across our screens.

And what about her sister?
The one sold off to marry a man older than her father,
Because her family had nothing left to cope,
Because the rains never came,
Because the crops refused to grow.

She has no clue what education means,
No idea what letters form the words of her stolen future.
She has forgotten what it feels like to dream,
What it feels like to sit in a classroom,
What it feels like to run,
To laugh, to hang out with friends.

She doesn’t know the world that is revolving around her.
Her world is still.
Her world is small.
Her world is shrinking,
With every decision made without her voice in the room.

But let me tell you,
Climate finance is not charity.
It’s not a debt.
It is an investment—
An investment in children, in youth,
In the soil they till, in the air they breathe,
In the futures they dare to dream but can’t yet reach.

When you invest in a child,
You’re not gifting.
You’re building.
When you give her water, you’re giving her life.
When you give her school, you’re giving her flight.

And COP, older than her years by decades,
Still debating, still calculating, still waiting.
How many COPs will it take for us to decide?
How many summits will it take to bring her into the room?
To agree, to act, to finally heal what’s breaking.

This isn’t policy—it’s humanity.
And if not us, then who?
If not now, then when?