Wangarĩ Maathai (born April 1, 1940; died September 25, 2011) was a Kenyan activist who worked to improve the environment, support women's rights, and promote social change. She founded the Green Belt Movement, a group that plants trees, protects the environment, and helps women in Kenya. In 2004, she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was helped by the Kennedy Airlift program, which allowed her to study in the United States. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, and a master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh. Later, she became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In 1984, she received the Right Livelihood Award for leading efforts to plant trees and address environmental problems in Kenya.

Maathai was elected to the Kenyan parliament and served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources from January 2003 to November 2005 under President Mwai Kibaki. She was also an Honorary Councillor in the World Future Council. As an academic and author, she wrote books and contributed to discussions about ecology, development, gender, and African cultures. She died on September 25, 2011, from complications caused by ovarian cancer.

Early life and education

Wangari Maathai was born on April 1, 1940, in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri District, in the central highlands of the British colony of Kenya. Her family was Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, and had lived in the area for many generations. Around 1943, Maathai’s family moved to a farm owned by white settlers in the Rift Valley near Nakuru, where her father found work. By late 1947, she returned to Ihithe with her mother because two of her brothers were attending school there, and no schools were available on the farm where her father worked. Her father remained at the farm. Soon after, she joined her brothers at Ihithe Primary School when she was eight years old.

At age eleven, Maathai moved to St. Cecilia’s Intermediate Primary School, a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri. She studied there for four years, during which she became fluent in English and became a Catholic. She was part of the Legion of Mary, a group that works to help others as a way of serving God. While at St. Cecilia’s, she was protected from the Mau Mau uprising, a conflict that forced her mother to move from their home to an emergency village in Ihithe. In 1956, Maathai finished her studies and was the top student in her class. She was accepted into Loreto High School, the only Catholic high school for girls in Kenya, located in Limuru.

As colonial rule in East Africa ended, Kenyan leaders like Tom Mboya proposed ways to send promising students to study in Western countries. John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, supported this through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, creating the Kennedy Airlift program. Maathai was one of about 300 Kenyans chosen to study in the United States in September 1960.

She received a scholarship to study at Mount St. Scholastica College (now Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kansas, where she majored in biology and minored in chemistry and German. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1964, she studied for a master’s degree in biology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her studies were funded by the Africa-America Institute. While in Pittsburgh, she first learned about environmental restoration when local activists worked to reduce air pollution. In January 1966, she received her MSc degree in biological sciences and was hired as a research assistant at the University College of Nairobi.

When Maathai returned to Kenya, she chose to use her birth name, Wangarĩ Muta, instead of her given name. When she arrived at the university to start her job, she was told that someone else had already been chosen. She believed this was due to bias based on gender and tribe. After two months of searching for work, Professor Reinhold Hofmann from the University of Giessen in Germany offered her a job as a research assistant in the microanatomy department of the newly created Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University College of Nairobi.

In April 1966, Maathai met Mwangi Mathai, another Kenyan who had studied in America, and they later married. She also rented a small shop in Nairobi and opened a general store, where her sisters worked. In 1967, Professor Hofmann encouraged her to pursue a doctorate at the University of Giessen in Germany. She studied at Giessen and the University of Munich. In spring 1969, she returned to Nairobi to teach at the University College of Nairobi. In May, she married Mwangi Mathai. Later that year, she became pregnant with her first child, and her husband ran for a seat in Parliament but lost the election. During the campaign, Tom Mboya, who had helped fund her education abroad, was killed. This event led President Kenyatta to end multi-party democracy in Kenya. Shortly after, her first son, Waweru, was born. In 1971, Maathai became the first woman from East Africa to earn a Ph.D., her degree in veterinary anatomy, from the University College of Nairobi, which became the University of Nairobi the following year. Her dissertation focused on how bovine gonads develop and change. Her daughter, Wanjira, was born in December 1971.

Activism and political life

Wangari Maathai continued to teach at the University of Nairobi. In 1975, she became a senior lecturer in anatomy. In 1976, she became the chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy. In 1977, she became an associate professor. She was the first woman in Nairobi to hold any of these positions. During this time, she worked to ensure women at the university received equal benefits. She tried to turn the academic staff association into a union to help negotiate better conditions. The courts did not support this effort, but many of her requests for equal treatment were later met. In addition to her work at the university, Maathai joined several civic groups in the early 1970s. She became a member of the Nairobi branch of the Kenya Red Cross Society and its director in 1973. She also joined the Kenya Association of University Women. After the Environment Liaison Centre was created in 1974, Maathai became a member of its local board and later its chair. The Environment Liaison Centre worked to help non-governmental organizations take part in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP’s headquarters was established in Nairobi after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Maathai also joined the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). Through her work with these groups, she realized that many of Kenya’s problems were linked to environmental damage.

In 1974, Maathai’s family grew when she had her third child, a son named Muta. Her husband ran for a seat in Parliament to represent the Lang’ata constituency and won. During his campaign, he promised to create jobs to help reduce unemployment in Kenya. These promises inspired Maathai to connect her ideas about environmental restoration with job creation. This led to the founding of Envirocare Ltd., a company that planted trees to protect the environment and involved ordinary people in the work. This effort began with the planting of a tree nursery near a government nursery in Karura Forest. However, Envirocare faced challenges, especially with funding, and eventually failed. Despite this, her work with Envirocare and the Environment Liaison Centre helped UNEP send her to the first UN conference on human settlements, called Habitat I, in June 1976.

In 1977, Maathai spoke to the NCWK about her experience at Habitat I. She suggested planting more trees, and the council supported her idea. On June 5, 1977, which was World Environment Day, the NCWK marched from Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi to Kamukunji Park on the city’s outskirts. There, they planted seven trees to honor community leaders. This event marked the beginning of the Green Belt Movement. Maathai encouraged Kenyan women to plant tree nurseries across the country, using seeds from nearby forests to grow native trees. She offered a small payment to women for each seedling they planted elsewhere.

In her 2010 book, Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, Maathai described the impact of the Green Belt Movement. She explained that the group’s seminars emphasized the importance of communities taking responsibility for their actions and working together to solve local problems. She wrote, “We all need to work hard to make a difference in our neighborhoods, regions, and countries, and in the world as a whole. That means making sure we work hard, collaborate, and make ourselves better agents to change.” In this book, she also discussed how religious traditions, including the Kikuyu religion and Christianity, could be used to support environmental efforts.

Maathai and her husband, Mwangi Mathai, separated in 1977. After a long separation, Mwangi filed for divorce in 1979. He claimed Maathai was “too strong-minded for a woman” and that he could not control her. In court, he called her “cruel” and publicly accused her of having an affair with another member of Parliament. This accusation was thought to have caused his high blood pressure. The judge ruled in Mwangi’s favor. Soon after, Maathai criticized the judge in an interview with Viva magazine. This led the judge to charge her with contempt of court. She was found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail. After three days in Lang’ata Women’s Prison in Nairobi, her lawyer provided a statement that convinced the court to release her. Shortly after the divorce, her former husband sent a letter through his lawyer demanding that she drop his surname. Instead, she added an extra “a” to her name.

The divorce was expensive, and with legal fees and the loss of her husband’s income, Maathai struggled to support herself and her children on her university salary. She later found a job with the Economic Commission for Africa through the United Nations Development Programme. This job required her to travel across Africa and was based in Lusaka, Zambia. Because of this, she could not bring her children with her. She sent them to live with her ex-husband and took the job. While she visited them often, they lived with their father until 1985.

In 1979, shortly after the divorce, Maathai ran for the chairperson of the NCWK, an organization that included many women’s groups in Kenya. At the time, the newly elected president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, tried to reduce the influence of Kikuyu people in civic groups like the NCWK. Maathai lost the election by three votes but was chosen as vice-chairperson. In 1980, she ran again for chairman of the NCWK. She believes the government opposed her. When it seemed she would win, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake, a group that represented many rural women and was close to President Moi, withdrew from the NCWK. Maathai was then elected chairman without opposition. However, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake received most of the funding for women’s programs, leaving the NCWK nearly bankrupt. The NCWK survived by focusing more on environmental work and increasing its visibility. Maathai continued to be reelected as chairman every year until she retired in 1987.

In 1982, the parliamentary seat for Maathai’s home region of Nyeri became available. She decided to run for the position. As required by law, she resigned from her job at the University of Nairobi to campaign. The courts ruled she was not eligible to run because she had not re-registered to vote in the 1979 presidential election. Maathai believed this was false and illegal. She took the matter to court. The court was scheduled to meet at 9 a.m., and if she won her case, she had to submit her candidacy papers in Nyeri by 3 p.m. the same day. The judge disqualified her on a technicality, saying she should have re-registered to vote. When she asked for her job back, she was denied. Because she lived in university housing and was no longer a staff member, she was evicted.

Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 in response to environmental concerns raised by rural communities.

2004 Nobel Peace Prize

Wangarĩ Maathai received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in making the environment better, helping people vote freely, and promoting peace. She was the first African woman to win this important award. According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize is given to the person who "has done the most or the best work for friendship between countries, for reducing military forces, and for organizing meetings to talk about peace." Between 1901 and 2018, only 52 Nobel Prize awards were given to women, while 852 were given to men. Through her important work, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the Peace Prize.

— The Norwegian Nobel Committee, in a statement announcing her as the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

AIDS conspiracy theory

A disagreement happened when the Kenyan newspaper The Standard reported that Maathai said HIV/AIDS was "intentionally made by Western scientists to harm the African population." Maathai said she did not make those claims, but The Standard did not change its report.

In a 2004 interview with Time magazine, when asked about the report, Maathai said, "I do not know who created AIDS or if it is something that causes disease. But I know things like that do not come from the moon. I believe it is important to tell the truth, but I think some truths should not be shared too openly." When asked what she meant, she added, "I am talking about AIDS. I believe people already know where it came from. And I am certain it did not come from monkeys." She then made the following statement.

2005–2011: Later life

In 2005, after visiting Japan, Maathai became a strong supporter of the mottainai philosophy, which is a Japanese term of Buddhist origin that encourages reducing waste. On March 28, 2005, she was elected as the first president of the African Union's Economic, Social, and Cultural Council. She also became a goodwill ambassador for a program focused on protecting the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem. In 2006, she was one of eight flag-bearers during the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics. On May 21, 2006, she received an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College and gave a speech at the college's graduation. She supported the International Year of Deserts and Desertification program. In November 2006, she led the United Nations Billion Tree Campaign. Maathai was one of the founders of the Nobel Women's Initiative, along with other Nobel Peace laureates, including Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Betty Williams, and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. Six women from different parts of the world joined together to work for peace, justice, and equality. The goal of the Nobel Women's Initiative is to support efforts that help protect women's rights globally.

In August 2006, United States Senator Barack Obama visited Kenya. His father had been educated in the same program as Maathai. She met with Senator Obama, and they planted a tree together in Uhuru Park in Nairobi. Obama spoke about the importance of press freedom, saying it is like taking care of a garden; it needs constant care and attention. He also criticized the loss of global ecosystems and pointed out that President George W. Bush had refused to join the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol.

In November 2007, Maathai was not chosen as a candidate by the Party of National Unity for parliamentary elections. She then ran for a smaller party but lost the December 2007 parliamentary election. She asked for a recount of votes in the presidential election in her area, which was officially won by Mwai Kibaki but disputed by the opposition. She believed both sides should accept the results as fair and noted signs of possible fraud.

In 2009, Maathai published a book titled "The Challenge for Africa," which shared her views on governance in Africa, her personal experiences, and the importance of protecting the environment for Africa's future. In June 2009, she was named one of PeaceByPeace.com's first peace heroes. Until her death in 2011, Maathai served on the Eminent Advisory Board of the Association of European Parliamentarians with Africa (AWEPA).

Wangari Maathai passed away on September 25, 2011, due to complications from ovarian cancer while receiving treatment in Nairobi. Her remains were cremated and buried at the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies in Nairobi.

Wangarĩ Maathai Forest Champion Award

In 2012, the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), a group of 14 international organizations, secretariats, and institutions that work on forest-related issues, started the first Wangarĩ Maathai Forest Champion Award.

• 2012 – Narayan Kaji Shrestha, with an honorable mention to Kurshida Begum
• 2014 – Martha Isabel "Pati" Ruiz Corzo, with an honorable mention to Chut Wutty
• 2015 – Gertrude Kabusimbi Kenyangi
• 2017 – Maria Margarida Ribeiro da Silva, a Brazilian forestry activist
• 2019 – Léonidas Nzigiyimpa, a Burundian forestry activist
• 2022 – Cécile Ndjebet, a Cameroonian activist

Posthumous recognition

In 2012, Wangarĩ Gardens opened in Washington, D.C. Wangarĩ Gardens is a community garden for local residents. It has more than 55 garden plots and covers 2.7 acres. The garden honors the legacy of Wangarĩ Maathai and her work to help communities and protect the environment. The garden includes a community garden, youth garden, outdoor classroom, pollinator hive, public fruit tree orchard, vegetable garden, herb garden, berry garden, and a strawberry patch. The garden has both personal plots for residents and public gardens. Personal plots are available to people who live within 1.5 miles of the garden. Those who use personal plots must spend 1 hour each month helping to care for the public gardens. The gardens and orchard are maintained by plot holders and volunteers. Everyone can visit and enjoy the gardens. Wangarĩ Gardens is not connected to the Green Belt Movement or the Wangarĩ Maathai Foundation but was inspired by her work and love for the environment.

On September 25, 2013, the Wangarĩ Maathai Trees and Garden was dedicated on the lawn of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. The memorial includes two red maple trees, which symbolize Maathai’s commitment to the environment, her founding of the Green Belt Movement, and her connections to Kenya and Pittsburgh. A flower garden shaped in a circle represents her global vision and dedication to helping women and children worldwide. An ornamental maple tree in the center of the garden shows how one small seed can grow into something that changes the world.

In 2014, Mount St. Scholastica classmates and Benedictine College unveiled a statue of Wangarĩ Maathai at her alma mater’s campus in Atchison, Kansas. This was during what would have been her 50th class reunion. In 2019, the college added a mural of Maathai and other scientists to the entrance of Westerman Hall of Science and Engineering during renovations.

In 2015, UNESCO published a graphic novel titled Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement as part of their UNESCO Series on Women in African History. The book is meant for use in classrooms and tells the story of Maathai and the movement she started.

In October 2016, Forest Road in Nairobi was renamed Wangarĩ Maathai Road. This change honored her efforts to protect forests and public parks through the Green Belt Movement.

In 2019, Time magazine created 89 new covers to celebrate women of the year, starting from 1920. Maathai was chosen for 2001.

In September 2022, Science Naturally, an educational publisher based in Washington, D.C., included Dr. Maathai in their book Women in Botany as part of the Science Wide Open series for children.

Selected publications

• The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Method and Experience. Lantern Books. 2004. ISBN 978-1590560402. ; (1985)
• The bottom is heavy too: even with the Green Belt Movement: the Fifth Edinburgh Medal Address (1994)
• Bottle-necks of development in Africa (1995)
• The Canopy of Hope: My Life Campaigning for Africa, Women, and the Environment (2002)
• Unbowed: A Memoir (2006) ISBN 978-0307492333
• Reclaiming rights and resources: women, poverty, and environment (2007)
• Rainwater Harvesting (2008)
• State of the world's minorities 2008: events of 2007 (2008)
• The Challenge for Africa. Anchor Books. 2010. ISBN 978-0307390288. ; (2009)
• Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. (2010) chapter Nelson, Michael P. and Kathleen Dean Moore (eds.). Trinity University Press, ISBN 978-1595340665
• Replenishing the Earth (2010) ISBN 978-0307591142