Meet the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize

She was born on April 1, 1940, in a small village in Nyeri County, in the green highlands of central Kenya. At that time, girls, especially in rural areas, weren’t expected to go far in school.

In the 1960s, during a time when newly independent African nations were investing in education, Wangari was selected for the Kennedy Airlift, a program that sent promising students from East Africa to study in the United States. She left Kenya and enrolled at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas, where she studied biology. It was a huge cultural shift, but she thrived.

While in the U.S., she saw something she hadn’t experienced before, large-scale civic movements. The civil rights movement, environmental campaigns, and anti-war protests were all in full swing, and it left an impression.

Wangari returned to Kenya in the late 1960s and earned a PhD from the University of Nairobi, becoming the first woman in East Africa to achieve that milestone.

But the more she saw of her country, the more worried she became. Forests were being cleared at an alarming rate. Rivers were drying up. Soil was eroding. And it was the rural women, women just like the ones she’d grown up around who were feeling it most. They were walking longer distances to find firewood. Their crops were failing. Their families were going hungry.

So in 1977, she started something small. She asked women to plant trees. One by one.

That small idea grew into the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental organization that would go on to plant tens of millions of trees across Kenya.

As her work expanded, she began to challenge the Kenyan government, particularly around issues of land grabbing, deforestation, and corruption. Her protests against illegal developments in public green spaces, like Uhuru Park in Nairobi, made headlines which got her arrested.

In 2002, after years of activism, Wangari was elected to Kenya’s Parliament and later appointed Assistant Minister for the Environment. Two years after that, she received one of the highest honors in the world: the Nobel Peace Prize. She was the first African woman to receive it.

The Nobel Committee praised her for her “holistic approach to sustainable development,” linking environmental conservation with human rights and political freedom. For Wangari, it was never just about the trees. It was about justice, dignity, and giving people the tools to improve their own lives.

Even after receiving the Nobel, she didn’t slow down. She travelled constantly, speaking around the world on climate change, women’s rights, good governance, and peace. She met world leaders and rural farmers with equal respect.

Wangari Maathai passed away in 2011 after a battle with cancer, but her work is far from over. The Green Belt Movement continues.

Wangari once said, “It’s the little things citizens do. That’s what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.”