CASE STUDY 22
Using Arts, Theater, and Storytelling to Challenge Gender & Climate Discourse
Pakistan
Context
In the regions where YCM operates, climate impacts, gender inequality, and exclusion intersect in ways that are often overlooked in mainstream discourse. Girls are pulled out of school during floods and forced into early marriages. Without toilets in flood-affected or rural areas, menstruation becomes unsafe and undignified. Minority and marginalized youth, including women, religious minorities, and underrepresented communities, face heightened risks and are often excluded from humanitarian aid and decision-making spaces. SRHR, peacebuilding, and human rights are rarely addressed in climate or development programming in Pakistan. Policies often sideline bodily autonomy and social inclusion, treating climate as purely an environmental or infrastructural problem while neglecting its human and gendered dimensions.
Organization
The Young Changemakers (YCM) is a youth-led feminist movement founded by young people that works at the intersection of climate justice, gender justice, social inclusion, peacebuilding, and SRHR. At the heart of YCM’s identity is the arts as activism. They believe that theatre and storytelling are not only tools for expression but powerful vehicles for awareness, advocacy, and the protection and promotion of human rights in Pakistan. By engaging communities through the arts, YCM creates safe spaces where the voices of marginalized youth are heard, taboos are challenged, and social norms can be transformed.
Approach
YCM challenges this narrow framing by insisting that bodily autonomy, peace, social inclusion, and arts are central to true resilience. Interactive and forum theatre is used to connect climate change, gender justice, and SRHR with lived realities like child marriage, abuse, health care barriers, and displacement. Storytelling and the creative arts help young people express their trauma, rehearse alternatives to harmful traditions, and reimagine equitable futures. Community dialogues and school clubs provide safe spaces for learning, leadership, and solidarity, building bridges across divides. Through this arts-based advocacy, YCM ensures that young people are not treated as passive victims but recognized as leaders, creators, and agents of transformation.
Results to Date
Trained more than 200 theatre groups and collaborated with over 300 organizations across Pakistan.
Directly reached over 300,000 people through interactive performances, workshops, and storytelling spaces.
Inspired behavioral and intergenerational change, including parents choosing to educate daughters instead of marrying them early. Advanced peace and social inclusion by bringing marginalized voices of women, youth, and minorities into civic and policy spaces through art.
Earned recognition in national and international forums for pioneering the use of arts-based feminist and human rights approaches to advocacy.
“Floods, heatwaves, child marriage, and displacement in camps - these aren’t separate issues. Climate hits bodies before it hits buildings.”
SOBIA ALI
Founding Director, The Young Changemakers
PDF Innovative Approaches to Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Sexual & Reproductive Health: Case Studies from Around the World