Nobel Prize winner says education key to success

Written by Crystal Clarke

Thursday, 21 October 2004

Wangari Maathai got word about her newest accomplishment, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, as she was planting trees in a rural area in Africa. She is the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the first person in the history of the Nobel Prize to be recognized for environmental activism. Eventually Norwegian television caught up with Maathai and she commented, “I am absolutely overwhelmed and very emotionally charged, really,” she said. “The environment is very important in the aspects of peace, because when we destroy our resources and our resources become scarce, we fight over that. I am working to make sure we don’t.” In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, a program that is carried out primarily by women in the villages of Kenya to plant trees in lieu of the deforestation problem that Africa has been undergoing. The program also taught rural women about the relationship between deforestation and erosion, paying them a small fee for the trees they planted. Maathai earned undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Biology in the United States, before returning to Kenya to get her PhD, making her the first woman in east and central Africa to do so. She also became the head of the veterinary medicine faculty at the University of Nairobi, another first for a woman to head a department in the country. She attributes her accomplishments and passion on education: “The privilege of a higher education, especially outside Africa, broadened my original horizon and encouraged me to focus on the environment, women and development in order to improve the quality of life of people in my country in particular and in the African region in general.” Maathai has not always had it easy. Over the past five years, she has been beaten and jailed for her activism of tree-planting and speaking out against the deforestation in her country. However, in 2002 she was elected to parliament and was appointed to the position of Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife. Her latest accomplishment of winning the Nobel Peace Prize includes $1.3-million (U.S.) and will be presented to Ms. Maathai on December 10 in Oslo, Norway.