It wasn't—and still isn't—a fancy part of town. The homes are relatively small and close to the street, the roads are pitted with potholes that fill with muddy water during the rainy season, and small market stalls crowd the sidewalks. My bungalow-style house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, so it was relatively quiet, and it ended up being a good place to live and work. I planted many trees and shrubs there and it became the greenest house in the vicinity. I love that house because it saved my life. I lived in it for nearly twenty-five years.
During those first months after I left the university I spent a lot of my time reflecting on what had happened and what I would do next. This was good, because for many years I had not had the time or space to think. While I was going through the divorce and feeling under a lot of pressure, I embraced a philosophy that has given me strength in difficult times ever since. Every experience has a lesson. Every situation has a silver lining. Each person needs to raise their consciousness to a certain level so that they will not give up or succumb. If your consciousness is at such a level, you are willing to do what you believe is the right thing—popular opinion notwithstanding.
We do the right thing not to please people but because it's the only logically reasonable thing to do, as long as we are being honest with ourselves—even if we are the only ones. I felt this statement was so important that I included it in one of the first pamphlets I wrote about the Green Belt Movement.
Although my marriage was over, my chance to run for Parliament ended, my job and my home gone, at least one part of my life had not been lost: I was still the chairman of the National Council of Women of Kenya and I was still developing the Green Belt Movement. At that time, the NCWK was a relatively poor organization and everybody was a volunteer, but visiting the offices gave me a sense of purpose. The Green Belt Movement was still a relatively small effort that I had worked on outside the hours I was at the university. Now, I started thinking hard about what the Green Belt Movement could become and the impact it could have if it was nurtured and grew and had sufficient funding and direction.
By then I knew that to be successful, an organization and the person heading it had to have plans and carry them out; they could not just talk. You also had to be willing to be something of an activist. You had to tell people, “This is not being done,” and explain why the current situation needed to change. If you didn't, you could easily become irrelevant. I had also seen by then how important it was to make the Green Belt Movement's work of interest to the Kenyan press, since they helped spread the message about what we were doing and why it was valuable.
Generally, during those months that followed my leaving the university, I was in good spirits, although I still needed employment. I knew that I would never get another position inside the University of Nairobi, which was then still the only university in Kenya. It was controlled by the government and I had rubbed the establishment the wrong way. In order to be employed by the United Nations, for example at the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, the government would have had to endorse me and it was obvious that that was not going to happen.
I began to fill out applications for positions in the private sector. The replies I received were not promising. “You are overqualified,” one said. “We will get in touch with you as soon as we have an opportunity,” said another, not very helpfully. It dawned on me that no one would employ me because they saw me as an enemy of the political system. I had been in a direct confrontation with the government.
Fortunately, an opportunity presented itself within that year that was to change the course of my life and the future of the Green Belt Movement. Some of the seeds of this were sown earlier. In August 1981, Kenya hosted a UN conference on new and renewable sources of energy. This was an issue high on the international agenda at the time and the Green Belt Movement's work fit well with the con- ference's goals. For two weeks, government officials and members of environmental, energy, and appropriate technology organizations met and agreed on a plan of action to promote new sources of renewable, “green” energy and good management of forests.
As chair of the local board of the Environment Liaison Centre, I coordinated the efforts of local NGOs to prepare for the conference and we formed an umbrella group for all the organizations then dealing with issues of renewable sources of energy. We set up a booth opposite Nairobi's City Hall near where the delegates were meeting at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre and established a woodlot, now called Global Forest, where dignitaries continue to plant trees.
We also organized a march in support of the conference. Hundreds of us wound our way from Uhuru (“Freedom”) Park, down Uhuru Highway, past the New Stanley and Hilton hotels, and in front of City Hall, before arriving at the conference center. Many NGOs, both Kenyan and international, participated, including the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Chipko movement from India (which had pioneered the hugging of trees to protest rampant logging), and, of course, the Environment Liaison Centre. I had arranged for a number of children to carry tree seedlings in the march. When we arrived, the children handed their precious packages to the dignitaries who had gathered on the conference center's spacious steps to meet us. It was fantastic to see all these important people from around the world holding tiny trees—and the press was there to cover the entire event.
That conference on new and renewable energy sources was also important in other ways. I interacted with a number of people working with NGOs in both industrialized and developing countries who were very interested in what the Green Belt Movement was doing. By this time I had sent a proposal for funding to the United Nations Voluntary Fund for the Decade for Women, which was established after the Mexico City conference. The Voluntary Fund, which later became the UN Development Fund for Women, or UNIFEM, was headed by Margaret Snyder, who had lived in Kenya and knew the work of the NCWK.
I kept my fingers crossed that the proposal would be well received back at the Voluntary Fund's offices in New York.
One afternoon in 1982I was in the NCWK office, carrying out my usual activities, when a tall white man walked in. “I'm looking for Wangari Maathai,” he said. “That's me,” I replied. He explained that he was Wilhelm Elsrud, the executive director of the Norwegian Forestry Society. “We have heard about the Green Belt Movement and we want to find out more about what you are doing,” he added. “We want to see if we can partner with you.” This was music to my ears!
Wilhelm and I discussed the Green Belt Movement's work, and I showed him several of the tree nurseries. He was interested in what he saw and asked if I could think of how Green Belt and the Norwegian Forestry Society could work together. Since I needed to find employment I told him I wasn't sure how much time I could spend on the collaboration. “We'll need to employ someone,” I said.
Within a few months Wilhelm returned from Norway with some funding and an idea. “Since you still don't have a job,” he said, “why don't you take the position of coordinator we were talking about?” He confirmed that there was not much money, but said he could provide me with a small allowance that would help me manage as I looked for a full-time position. I thought about it: I didn't have another job and I wanted to focus more of my attention and energy on the Green Belt Movement. So I accepted his offer.
The rest, as they say, is history. I never looked for another job, since strengthening and expanding the Green Belt Movement as its coordinator became my work and my passion. As it turned out, though, the first substantial funds the NCWK received for the Green Belt Movement came from the UN Voluntary Fund for Women, which decided toward the end of 1981 to provide “seed money” to expand our work. The grant they approved was significant: $122,700(U.S.). That was more money than I'd seen in my life!
The funds were given to the UN Development Programme office in Nairobi to administer. I would ask for money as I needed it, account for how I spent it, and then ask for more. This arrangement worked very well. If the funds had landed all at once on the Green Belt Movement, it probably would
have overwhelmed us and we might not have been as efficient as we were in how we used the money. As part of the grant, there was an emolument for me of around $600(U.S.) a year. That wasn't much, but I hadn't had a salary since I'd left the university, so anything was welcome. I have never needed a lot of money to live on, so I didn't feel deprived.
The Voluntary Fund's grant was crucial because it let me expand the Green Belt Movement's activities. Coming from a UN agency, that grant gave the Green Belt Movement a certain legitimacy that helped other funders feel secure as we sought support from them. More directly, the grant allowed me to hire people. Until then, the only staff had been me. Now I employed a handful of young women who had recently completed high school to serve as “monitors.” They worked in Nairobi and in the field to assess what the community-based groups were doing. They also provided technical assistance as required, verified the number of surviving seedlings, and paid the women their compensation.
The funds also alleviated my near-constant worries about the Green Belt Movement's survival, at least for a few years. Many people have wonderful ideas, but if they don't get seed money to develop them, they can never germinate. Because of the grant, the vision I'd had back in the early 1970s was transformed from some talk and a few tree nurseries into the planting of literally millions of seedlings and the mobilization of thousands of women. It would be several years before I met Margaret Snyder, who became my dear friend Peggy. I am forever grateful to her and the Voluntary Fund. They were truly midwives to the Green Belt Movement's birth.
Now all I needed to worry about was work, and I worked like a donkey. I think I became a workaholic, but I enjoyed watching the activities expand, and in the process seeing people in the communities getting excited, too. The work was challenging as I applied the knowledge I had gained through my academic career in a whole new way. It was rewarding to see tree planting having an impact and actually changing conditions on the ground.
Our partnership with the Norwegian Forestry Society also got off the ground. One of our earliest collaborations began at Karugia Primary school in Murang'a, about an hour's drive north of Nairobi on the way to Nyeri. President Kenyatta had planted a tree in the school compound. The tree had died and been replaced, but the school authorities approached me about the Green Belt Movement's planting more trees in the school compound. I agreed, but thought an opportunity existed to establish a larger program with the community. As it happened, a young man, Kinyanjui Kiuno, with whom I had been working in a nursery at the University of Nairobi, came to the NCWK office and said he was interested in planting trees. He no longer worked at the university and was looking for a job. “Do you want to go to Murang'a?” I asked him. When he agreed, I sent him to start doing outreach in that area. He still works for the Green Belt Movement, especially as a trainer.
The project in Murang'a, fortunately, went extremely well. We had adequate money and community acceptance from the outset. When the Norwegian Forestry Society exhausted its resources, it encouraged the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the government's overseas aid agency, to support us, which it did for many years. We were able to expand our efforts in Murang'a and it became one of our most successful programs. To this day, as you drive along the main road that connects Murang'a with Nairobi, you can see thick groves of trees stretching from the valley into the hills that have been planted by Green Belt Movement groups.
I was learning on the job. I asked myself constantly whether something could be done differently or better. For instance, at first I encouraged groups of women to cultivate their seedlings together at large nurseries. This system was easier for me, because when I would visit a nursery I would see a lot of groups planting trees together. However, I began to realize that this didn't work well for the women. The nursery may have been several miles from some of the women's villages and they had no transport apart from their feet. So they found it difficult to travel to the nursery each day to water their trees. In addition, the fact that the nurseries served communities in a wide radius meant that the seedlings would often be planted on farms very far from the women's homes. This made it hard for the women to ensure that their seedlings had been planted and had survived.
My solution was to encourage women from groups whose members were walking more than three miles each way to one of these large nurseries to establish nurseries in their own villages instead. This not only increased the number of nurseries but also the number of communities that benefited from them, because the trees were more readily available closer to people's homes. It was also easier for people to come and pick up trees for their farms, and for the women to check on the trees once they had been planted.
I also decided that to make the Green Belt approach truly effective, the incentive system we had in place had to be refined. We weren't going to meet our objectives if we simply raised seedlings and put them in the ground. To restore degraded lands, we had to make certain those trees thrived. So I told the women: “You have to make sure that the people you give your seedlings to have planted them, and that they have survived for at least six months. That is when we will compensate you.” This is still the way the Green Belt Movement operates.
I saw other ways to improve our effectiveness. While we wanted the women to spend time on tree planting, we also knew they had many other daily responsibilities that took up their time, from cultivating to cooking to caring for their children. One of the requests the women had was help in looking for the seeds on the ground from which they grew their trees. Since many of the women could not read or write, they also needed someone to maintain the records we required the groups to keep: how many seedlings they had cultivated, how many had been planted, and, most important, how many had survived after six months.
When I asked the women who they wanted to take on these tasks, they almost always chose one of their husbands or sons. These became what we called “nursery attendants.” Hiring them created employment for many men, who would otherwise have had few options to earn additional income. It also made sense to hire men in these roles since the job required someone who was able to travel within a radius of several miles and convince farmers, schools, and others to plant trees. Only a young man would have the freedom to go knocking on people's doors.
Since these young men were educated at least through high school, we taught them about the different tree species, how to treat seeds and plant the trees, and why it was important to keep accurate records so the women would be paid. We made it a policy that the nursery attendants speak and write in their local language as well as in English. We knew the government would want to see proper records and that keeping them in English would confer more legitimacy and transparency.
The sight of these men was always a surprise to those who came to evaluate the Green Belt Movement's work. “We thought this was a women's organization,” they would say, “but there are men here!” To my great disappointment, over the years we discovered that many of these young men turned out to be dishonest. They padded the numbers of seedlings the women cultivated and the number of trees that survived. What the men didn't realize was that our ten-step process allowed us to detect where, along the way, fraud had been committed. This dishonesty was very disturbing, and highlighted for me the challenge facing the larger society. If corruption like this existed at the grassroots, I could only imagine what it was like in the higher echelons of government and society in general.
As the Green Belt Movement developed, I became convinced that we needed to identify the roots of the disempowerment that plagued the Kenyan people. We had to understand why we were losing firewood; why there was malnutrition, scarcity of clean water, topsoil loss, and erratic rains; why people could not pay school fees; and why the infrastructure was falling apart. Why were we robbing ourselves of a future?
Gradually, the Green Belt Movement grew from a tree-planting program into one that planted ideas as well. We held seminars with the communities in which Green Belt worked, in which I encouraged wome
n and men to identify their problems. As they spoke, I would write. Sometimes the list they generated would grow to 150 items. “Where do you think these problems come from?” I would ask. Almost to a person they put all the blame on the government.
It was partly true: The government was selling off public lands to its cronies and allowing tree farms for the timber industry to be established in national forests, and so destroying watersheds and biodiversity. In many ways the government continued the policies of the colonial era, but made sure the benefits went only to the small elite it favored. In turn, of course, this elite strongly supported the government and helped it stay in power.
However, I felt strongly that people needed to understand that the government was not the only culprit. Citizens, too, played a part in the problems the communities identified. One way was by not standing up for what they strongly believed in and demanding that the government provide it. Another was that people did not protect what they themselves had. “It is your land,” I said. “You own it, but you are not taking care of it. You're allowing soil erosion to take place and you could do something about it. You could plant trees.” I would also remind them that they had stopped growing their traditional foods that provided good nutrition. Instead, they were cultivating exotic crops that often didn't do well in the local soils. I urged them to look at their problems and the solutions more deeply. “Even though you blame the government,” I said, “you really should also blame yourself. You need to do something about your situation. Do whatever is within your power.”
Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage) Page 19