Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan environmental and political activist who, in 1977, founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization that mobilized Kenyan women to plant trees in order to fight deforestation, restore degraded land, and generate income and firewood in rural communities, a program that grew to involve the planting of tens of millions of trees across Kenya and inspired similar movements elsewhere in Africa. Her environmental work was closely bound up with advocacy for democracy, women's rights and government accountability, and she and the movement she led faced repeated harassment, arrest and violence from the Kenyan government of the time as her activism increasingly challenged land seizures and authoritarian rule. Earlier in her career she had already broken significant ground academically, becoming the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctoral degree, in veterinary anatomy, and later the first woman to chair a university department in the region. In 2004 she became the first African woman, and the first environmentalist, to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, recognized for what the prize committee described as her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace, and she went on to serve as an elected member of the Kenyan Parliament and as an assistant government minister before her death in 2011.