"This man lived fully and happily. He strongly believed he could transform the world—and he did.”
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and our entire community are shocked and deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Sena Alouka, Executive Director of Jeunes Volontaires pour l’Environnement (JVE-Togo) and founding Chair of AFSA’s Climate and Agroecology Working Group.
AFSA Chair Reverend Thomas Tolbert Jallah said: “Sena was a mentor, an inspiration and a guide—one of the pillars upon which AFSA was built. On behalf of the young people he called his children, the farmers whose soil he fought to protect, the fisherfolk whose rivers he defended and the pastoralists whose lands he held sacred, we mourn him with broken hearts.”
Sena often told us that his name meant “Gift from God.” His mother, Davé, had prayed for a daughter and received instead a son who would go on to mother a continent. He was indeed a gift. For more than two decades, he devoted himself to Africa’s environment, climate, biodiversity, food and culture—and, above all, to its young people, calling generation after generation to rise, learn and lead.
His life’s work began with a fire on a mountain above his childhood village of Kpélé Tsiko in 1999. The whole community went out to fight it, returning with burned cassava and yams in their hands—and something new burning within Sena. From those ashes, with neither money nor a map, he founded Young Volunteers for the Environment. What began with children raising tree seedlings in a small Togolese village grew into one of Africa’s largest youth-led environmental movements, now rooted in more than thirty countries.
“Sena Alouka was a rare kind of leader. He breathed life back into youth volunteerism and activism for Africa’s environment, biodiversity, culture and indigenous knowledge at a time when few believed young people could lead this fight. He was instrumental in starting AFSA’s Agroecology and Climate Working Group, and he was the one who insisted, again and again, that we create a Youth Working Group of our own. He was a driving force for change, always seeking new opportunities, expanding the frontiers of possibility for Africa’s youth and shifting mindsets towards a proactive, impactful life. His loss leaves a huge gap in youth activism across this continent—a grief we feel deeply today. But his legacy will not be buried with him. We will carry it forward and ensure that it is celebrated for as long as this movement lives.” — Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator, AFSA
An unrelenting Pan-Africanist, Sena drew strength from Africa’s liberation leaders and carried the continent’s history with extraordinary passion. He understood that a movement without memory is a movement without direction, and he constantly reminded young people that Africa’s unfinished struggle for dignity was now theirs to carry forward.
His influence reached far beyond Togo. He chaired the Climate and Agroecology Working Group of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa; served as facilitator of CAN International’s Energy Working Group; and was a strategic advisor to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a trustee of the African Biodiversity Network and Global Coordinator of Ashoka Africa’s ICON nutrition programme—all while serving as patron of the Young Environmental Negotiators Academy and mentoring the very generation he now leaves to carry the torch. In 2014, Ashoka named him a Fellow among the world’s changemakers, twelve years after the IUCN–Reuters Award first recognised his voice as a young environmental journalist. But he had already been a changemaker as a teenager, when he built a community radio station from a car battery and scrap metal on a tin roof and called it Radio Hakuna Matata.
Sena also stood at the birth of YOUNGO, the official youth constituency of the United Nations climate negotiations. After finding himself the only Francophone African at a meeting in Montreal in 2005, he resolved that it would never happen again. The following year, he helped establish the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change and went on to guide generations of young Africans into international policy spaces from which they had long been excluded. There is hardly a young African climate leader today who does not owe some part of their path to his hand at their back.
Sena was that rare breed of leader whose actions were as forceful as his words—an electrifying advocate who spoke boldly yet acted with equal resolve, turning conviction into reality. His organising helped Togo reject a national energy law that would have entrenched coal and nuclear power and become the first country in the world to ban glyphosate. Long before agroecology became widely known, he championed it as an inherently African wisdom inherited from our ancestors. He persisted until it became part of Togo’s national strategy—not because he claimed to have invented it, but because he refused to let the world forget that it was already ours.
Those who knew Sena will remember a character larger than life—a man who wore his passion on his sleeve and whose commanding presence could fill a room. His speeches were positive and lively, sometimes loud and bold, but never, ever dull. He was known for his distinctive humour, his gift for storytelling and his truly captivating personality. Yet behind that smiling, luminous face lived a quieter seriousness: a fiercely pragmatic activist who could galvanise, mobilise, organise and lead with a fire that made every single moment matter.
Sena wanted one line carved on his tombstone: “This man lived fully and happily. He strongly believed he could transform the world—and he did.”
A forest does not fall silent when one great tree comes down. It grows around the space left behind—and it remembers. We are that forest.
Rest now, Papa Sena, in the soil you spent a lifetime restoring. We will keep alive the fire you lit. We will keep planting, even the trees whose fruit we may never live to eat, exactly as you taught us.
Sena—Gift from God—thank you for being ours.
With broken hearts and unbroken resolve,
Rest in peace, Papa Sena.
