We often see white celebrities in Africa with their “saving the poor” pictures, but do they ever think that maybe Africa could save its own self? Since the colonialism times, the
“saviour mentality” that first world countries tend to have towards Africa has caused many problems. Those with the “saviour mentality” often think they can save Africa as its people are “fragile and poor and cannot save themselves”. This mentality is absolutely wrong as there are many organizations all over the continent of Africa that are doing amazing work to save their countries. The Green Belt Movement in Kenya is one of them.
History of The Green Belt Movement
The Green Belt Movement was founded in 1977 by professor Wangari Maathai who went on to be the first environmentalist and the first African American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai was inspired to start the movement to address issues of deforestation, soil erosion and lack of fresh water. Seeing that the forest cover in Kenya fell from 12% to 2% since the 1960s, Maathai felt more inspired than ever.
In the first few years, she worked with other local women to restore the community where they were losing many trees. The movement that started out to solve food and water insecurity locally became notorious for planting over 51 million trees in Kenya alone!
Check out the video below of Maathai’s explanation of why she started the movement:
Climate Change Plan
The movement is not only concerned with planning trees but with problems such gender inequality and Climate Change. The latter is actually in relation to planting trees as forest restoration is important for CO2 absorption. Therefore, the Green Belt Movement joined the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) program that is run by the United Nations. The program has many projects that governments all over the world partner up with. For example, one of the projects involves working on the Mt. Kenya forest and the Congo Basin which is the “second lung” of the earth after the Amazon Forest.
Become A Hummingbird
Would you also like to inspire change in your community? The Green Belt movement loves volunteers so it created the Hummingbird program where you can join the movement and earn your hummingbird wings by planting trees in your own neighborhood! Their website offers tips and guidelines on how to become more actively green. It also offers many presentations that you can download to become more acquainted with the history of Kenya!
Professor Wangari Maathai’s movement started out with a single person’s idea and passion. This then became a global movement that empowered many communities to make a change. So, if Professor Maathai did it, why can’t you?
What do you think of this movement? Would you like to become Hummingbird? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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