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Female leaders in climate and sustainability discussed their initiatives at a Harvard College Women’s Center event in honor of Earth Day on Wednesday.
The event, “Women Leading Climate Action: A Conversation on Equity, Power, and the Planet” featured four founders of eco-friendly organizations who discussed the future of female involvement in addressing the climate crisis.
Harvard Kennedy School student Hellen J. Chabunya is the founder of Chuma, an agricultural bank and support program aimed at reducing food insecurity among women and children in Malawi.
Chuma connects women in Malawi to small parcels of land and provides support and educational services, giving these women a source of income and increasing food security.
“The hope is that we’re going to roll out as a national program by the end of next year, and that will cover 400,000 acres of land that would directly impact about one million Malawian small-order farmers in food security,” Chabunya said.
Another speaker at the event, Dara C. Adamolekun ’25, is the founder of ReGeneración, an initiative which aims to help farmers in Africa.
“ReGeneración, is Spanish for ‘regeneration,’ is social innovation that aims to train young people in agro-technology and the digital skills to help farmers comply with a recent deforestation regulation,” she said in an interview with The Crimson.
A recent European Union regulation banned the sale of certain commodities unless they are proven not to “contribute to deforestation or forest degradation worldwide,” according to the European Commission website.
ReGeneración aims to help farmers comply with this regulation and prove that their products are sustainably produced by training young people in data collection methods.
The panel also welcomed Mary Catherine H. LaPlante ’26, a co-founder and CEO of Composite AI, a startup that helps small companies comply with an EU regulation requiring companies to report Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions over the next few years.
“We use AI to essentially help these smaller and medium-sized businesses who might not have as many resources as these large corporations to do this kind of work,” LaPlante said. “We help them with a super simple and easy AI platform that allows them to basically input all of their suppliers and have an estimate of their Scope 3 — their supply chain — carbon emissions.”
While these panelists spoke mainly about sustainability in terms of agriculture and carbon emissions, Hande Ilhan, a student at the Harvard Business School, also spoke about sustainable materials.
Ilhan is the founder of Kykloris, a startup working to turn crustacean shell waste into a sustainable biopolymer, called chitosan, that can have industrial, medical, and agricultural uses.
Chitosan is “a bio-based material, sustainable, natural and it can be turned into many different applications, like wool dressings that actually heal wounds faster than the traditional ones, or filter metals, microplastics from our water, many other amazing applications,” Ilhan said.
The meeting concluded with words of hope for the future and advice for those looking to get involved in the sustainability space.
“I’m very hopeful about this generation’s openness and proactiveness and activism in the climate space,” Chabunya said.
“It’s very important that women take up these spaces,” she said.
