Maathai, Wangari

Wangari Muta Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, is an activist for environmental conservation, democracy, and women's rights; a professor; and a former Kenyan parliamentarian. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work as a political advocate who helped combat poverty and deforestation by organizing women to plant millions of trees.

Maathai was born on April 1, 1940, the third of six children, along with several half siblings, in a small village near Nyeri, Kenya. Her parents were subsistence farmers who belonged to the largest ethnic group in Kenya at the time, the Kikuyu. Maathai's father and his four wives moved their family to Nakuru in 1943 to live on land owned by a European settler, who employed Maathai's father as a driver and mechanic.

At age 11, Maathai attended a Catholic boarding school in Kenya until she won a scholarship to Mount St. Scholastic College in Kansas, where she graduated in 1964 with a degree in biology. She went on to earn a master of science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966.

Her doctoral work included 20 months at the University of Giessen in Germany and about 2 years at the University of Nairobi, where she became the first woman in East Africa to earn a Ph.D., in 1971, and joined the faculty, teaching veterinary anatomy. She became department chair in 1976.

Maathai was married to Mwangi Maathai, a Kenyan businessman and politician, from 1969 until their divorce in 1979, and together they have three children. In 1977, she began growing trees in her backyard and soon gave seedlings to local women, paying them to start their own nurseries. In Kenya, women gather firewood for cooking, and Maathai saw her tree-planting program as a way to help women while saving deforested lands. Today, the Greenbelt Movement has helped create thousands of nurseries and has helped plant more than 40 million trees on community lands in Kenya alone.