Wangari Maathai and the Greenbelt Movement in Africa
by
usnret04 (student)
THE GREENBELT MOVEMENT
The Greenbelt Movement
Wangari Maathai was born and raised in an African village near Mt. Kenya and was lucky enough to go to college, something that was, and is, rare for African women to do. She studied biology in America and eventually returned to Africa to get her Ph.D. in anatomy. It was after returning to Africa that Maathai became aware of the struggles that African women were facing due to the steady decline of the country's ecological system.
"Rural women I met through the National Council of Women of Kenya, in which I was an officer, related their needs to me,” Maathai said in a speech to her peers. “They said they did not have enough wood for energy or good sources of clean drinking water or enough to eat, especially nutritious foods."
Maathai saw that the common thread to all of these problems was the declining environment around them. She took it upon herself to do something about the situation and founded the Green Belt Movement, a non-profit organization that plants trees to help restore the desolate ecosystem in Africa. Remembering the clear stream that she and her mother would fetch water from as a child and the vibrant trees and wildlife that surrounded her home, Maathai was deeply moved to bring back that life to Africa for its future inhabitants. She worried that if people who knew how it could be didn't act soon, then no one ever would.
