March 31st, 2021

Wangarĩ Muta Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wangari Maathai was born in 1940 in Tetu village in the central highlands of Kenya. She worked on farms until starting school at age of eight. In the 1960’s, she was among 300 young Africans to study in the United States through the Kennedy Airlift scholarship program.

She studied biological sciences and minored in chemistry and German in Atchison, Kansas. Maathai drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement which motivated her to use her education to advocate for social justice and environmental issues in her country. Further studies brought her back to Kenya and then to Germany. She was the first woman from East and Central Africa to earn a doctoral degree and went on to become the first woman associate professor in East and Central Africa.

In 1977, she founded Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, a grassroots tree-planting organization composed primarily of women working to curtail the devastating social and environmental effects of deforestation and desertification. She devoted her life to help empower Kenyan women to plant trees and halt further environmental destruction to their home.

Maathai was named ‘The mother of trees’ for her devotion to protecting nature and the environment overall. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Listening to the women talk about water, about energy, about nutrition, it all boiled down to the environment. I came to understand the linkage between environmental degradation and the felt needs of the communities.

—Wangari Maathai