Maathai, Wangari Muta (1940– )

Kenyan environmentalist and politician. She founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental organization, in 1977. In 1971 she became the first female black African to gain a PhD and was later the first Kenyan female professor at the University of Nairobi. She served as assistant minister for environment, natural resources and wildlife 2003–05, and in 2004 became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

She is an outspoken critic of African governments, western aid agencies, and the role of genetics in agriculture in the developing world. A persistent thorn in the side of the Kenyan authorities during the presidency of Daniel arap Moi, she was a tireless campaigner and became the target of beatings and arrests by the Kenyan government for generating local protests against major development projects and civil rights abuses.

Maathai was born in Nyeri and studied biological sciences at Benedictine College, Kansas, and the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received a doctorate from the University of Nairobi where she taught veterinary anatomy from 1969. She was chair of the department of veterinary anatomy 1973–81, and became an associate professor in 1977.

Maathai sought to run for parliament in the late 1970s, but the ruling party would not accept her and she lost her job at the university. She could not find anyone prepared to employ her subsequently, but undeterred she concentrated her energies on working for the Kenyan National Council for Women (chairing the council 1981–87), encouraging women from the Kenyan elite to share their education and expertise with the less privileged. Through the council she began the Green Belt Movement in 1977, which organized women to plant trees for firewood. This developed into a broad-based grassroots organization dedicated to conserving the environment and improving the quality of women's lives. It aims to promote and protect biodiversity, protect the soil, create employment, and generate income while giving women a positive image and encouraging them to develop their leadership qualities.

The Green Belt Movement grew fast and by the early 1980s around 2,000 green belts had been established, with half a million schoolchildren involved. Thousands of farmers had planted woodlots on their farms. In 1986 the movement went pan-African, and Green Belt methods have been established in Tanzania, Uganda, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. In its first 20 years, the movement achieved many of its objectives and women's groups had sold millions of seedlings to the movement, using the income for domestic needs including the education of children, or investing it in other income-generating schemes. Many women have been educated in forestry and there are over 3,000 nurseries in Kenya alone.

In the late 1980s she campaigned against the fraudulent allocation of gazetted government forests to wealthy individuals and in 1992 she was clubbed unconscious by police while pressing for the release of political prisoners, the scrapping of a planned multistorey building in Nairobi's Uhuru National Park, and the abolition of Kenya's single-party dictatorship. She and her fellow activists achieved all three of their aims.

In London in 1998 Maathai gave the Royal Society of Arts/BBC World Service Lecture, examining the links between debt, poverty, and environmental degradation and pointing out the threat posed to Africa by genetic engineering and the patenting of life forms by major corporations.

Maathai has been the recipient of several international awards including the Sasakawa Environment Prize in 1990, the Green Century Environmental Award for Courage in 1990, and the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1991; she was co-recipient of the Africa Prize for Leadership in 1991. She was awarded the Edinburgh Medal in 1993, the Légion d'honneur in 2006, and the Indira Gandhi Prize in 2007. Her publications include The Green Belt Movement (1985) and The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (1988).