Foundation or the Kennedy Airlift. The program aimed to provide education in Western countries to promising student. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Mount St. In pursuit of a doctorate, she travelled to Germany but received her doctorate in University of Nairobi, making her the first East African woman to receive a PhD in veterinary anatomy in Is there information that you would like Kenyans to know? Tell Hivisasa and we will share with the world. Click here to submit.
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Her husband, Mwangi Maathai, was a politician who divorced his wife in the mids, claiming that she was too educated and too difficult to control. While still a professor Maathai became involved in politics herself when she joined the National Council of Women of Kenya, an organization devoted to bettering the status of African women. While speaking to people living in rural areas, she discovered that the government had induced farmers to switch from growing crops for themselves to producing cash crops, such as coffee and tea, for exporting.
As a result, large expanses of forested land had been cleared to make room for more commercial farm production. Such change had a damaging effect on rural family life, especially for women. They could no longer grow food for their children because nutrients in the soil were depleted; they had no access to firewood, which was their main source of energy; livestock suffered because there was no vegetation to graze on; and streams were drying up or were polluted by soil runoff, resulting in a lack of drinking water.
Considering how enormous the issues were, Maathai felt that an immediate and straightforward plan was needed. She came up with a simple solution: plant trees. As Maathai explained to Michelle Martin of Catholic New World, "It occurred to me that some of the problems women talked about were connected to the land.
If you plant trees you give them firewood. If you plant trees you give them food. Earth Day is an annual day set aside to honor and celebrate the environment. Later that year, with backing from the National Council of Women, the budding environmentalist quit teaching and formed the Green Belt Movement. The group started small, with only a handful of villagers gathering seeds and planting them. At first, government officials laughed at the program, claiming that only professional foresters knew how to plant trees.
But eventually the first small groups of villagers trained other groups and over the next thirty years, more than thirty million trees were planted. Six thousand tree nurseries were created and operated by women, and jobs were provided for more than one hundred thousand people. Most importantly, an enormous power shift occurred as women began to take control of their futures. As authors Anne and Frances Lapp explained in Mother Earth News, "Women discovered they were not powerless in the face of oppressive husbands and village chiefs.
Although planting trees was the most visible Green Belt campaign, it was not its only focus. With support from the National Council of Women, Maathai created programs aimed at educating Kenyan women in areas such as family planning, nutrition, and leadership development. The movement also created a food-security campaign to reintroduce crops originally grown in the region and to reestablish kitchen gardens for individual family use. As the Green Belt Movement expanded, Maathai found herself increasingly at odds with the Kenyan government.
She explained to Amitabh Pal of the Progressive, "I started seeing the linkages between the problems that we were dealing with and the root causes I knew that a major culprit of environmental destruction was the government. Maathai's campaign was so successful that the building was never constructed. Since the elections, the political climate in Kenya took a turn for the better, with government leaders listening more intently to issues affecting women, and in turn allowing women to have more participation in policy decisions.
Sponsored in part by Comic Relief United Kingdom a group that provides funding for nonprofit organizations through comedy concerts , the goal of the program is to give women, especially young girls, a new sense of empowerment through education.
Other WFC initiatives include providing scholarships and tuition assistance to young girls who excel academically, and training women to gain income-generating skills, such as bee keeping. Now that women are making inroads on the political front in Kenya, WFC hopes to tackle some long-ingrained cultural problems. One way to do that is through the creation of a center for abused women and children. In Kenya women have historically been treated as property by their husbands, and no laws existed to protect women who were mistreated by their spouses.
The purpose of the center is to offer safety and shelter to women and children. More importantly it will be an education center for both men and women to break the cycle of abuse. Maathai soon began speaking out against the general corruption that ran wild throughout the administration of then-president Daniel arap Moi —.
Moi took office in and since then had ruled with a strong arm, imprisoning and sometimes torturing anyone suspected of opposing his authority. In Maathai formalized her political activism by cofounding the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy. As she explained to Michelle Martin, "I started out planting trees and found myself in the forefront of fighting for the restoration of democracy in my country.
For example, in , while participating in a hunger strike with mothers who were protesting the imprisonment of their sons—men who were pro-democracy activists—Maathai was brutally beaten by police.
Throughout the s Maathai was arrested, imprisoned, and intimidated time and again for speaking out against the Moi administration. She remained undaunted, however, and even made several attempts to run for public office.
In Maathai was approached to run for the presidency, but declined. The National Assembly is the ruling body in Kenya similar to the U. Congress and consists of members who are elected to five-year terms. Prior to the election the LPK withdrew their support of Maathai because of political differences—the party felt she would focus solely on environmental issues. Maathai also lost her bid for a seat in the National Assembly, coming in third. Because of constitutional restrictions, Moi was now allowed run for another presidential term in the December elections.
Therefore, in the first free and democratic elections held in nearly twenty-five years, Kenyan citizens voted in a new administration, with Mwai Kibaki — serving as president.
During the same elections Maathai won a seat in the National Assembly, taking 98 percent of the vote. In Wangari Maathai was honored with the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for her lifelong dedication to environmental and human rights. Since taking office, Maathai has worked to enact laws to protect not only the environment but also women's rights and human rights.
In she was integral in helping to shape Kenya's new Bill of Rights; she also represented Kenya at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, an international body of representatives convened to promote the rights of women worldwide.
In addition, Maathai continued in her role as an internationally recognized environmentalist. The movement also spread beyond the African borders to the United States, where representatives work through the Friends of the Greenbelt Movement North America. In a primary goal of Maathai was to extend the resources of the Green Belt Movement to help other areas of the world, such as the Republic of Haiti, which has also been ravaged by deforestation.
For her lifelong dedication to environmental and human rights Maathai has received numerous awards, including the Goldman Environmental Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, and the United Nation's Africa Prize for Leadership. The award is given annually by the Nobel Committee to individuals or organizations that work to promote peace, resolve conflict, or uphold human rights.
Traditionally, however, past Nobel winners tended to be people who worked for peace during times of war. When Maathai was chosen as the recipient she became the very first environmentalist to be recognized, and many wondered whether a "tree planter" deserved such an honor. Authors Anne and Frances Moore posed the question in Mother Earth News :"Why honor environmental activism in an era when war, terrorism and nuclear proliferation are even more urgent problems?
Environmental protection has become yet another path to peace. In her acceptance speech, which was quoted in the Progressive, Maathai also acknowledged being the first black woman to be honored with the Nobel: "As the first African woman to receive this prize, I accept it on behalf of the people of Kenya and Africa, and indeed the world. I hope it will encourage them to raise their voices and take more space for leadership.
According to Judith Stone of O Magazine she is a "notoriously terrific hugger. Maathai, Wangari. New York: Lantern Books, Robinson, Simon.
The Greenbelt Movement. Martin, Michelle. Pal, Amitabh. Stone, Judith. Toggle navigation. Human rights activist, environmentalist. Scholastica College now Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, where she was "We need to rethink our concept of peace and security.
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