The people building this every day.

I asked my colleagues, people I trained alongside, whether they knew about the relationship between climate change and health. They didn't. Not vaguely, not partially. They simply hadn't been taught it.

The environment wasn't a backdrop to my patients' health. It was shaping it directly, in front of me, and almost no one around me had the language to name what they were seeing.

So I went looking for where that gap actually lived. I found it in the curriculum. Climate change was absent from medical training across schools in Africa. Two truths sat closest to home for me: that our clinics collapse under climate shocks they were never built for, and that passionate students have no real platform to lead change. I had lived both.

Then I started where I was. For the first two months, it was just me, running a pilot study to find out how deep the knowledge gap actually went. Then the first volunteers found me, and within three months of that, we had launched the national survey and delivered our first webinar.

It wasn't an easy field to build in, climate-health still isn't common ground, and some people were understandably cautious. But others had been waiting for someone to start exactly this. I had real support around me, and my faith carried me through the moments of doubt.

Watching it grow into ACHII — the Regional Champions, the reach across 15+ countries, the team I've been blessed with — still feels unreal. I'm grateful, and we are just getting started.

— Dr. Aishat