An album that tells the story of a Kenyan woman with an exemplary destiny: environmental activist, founder of the “Green Belt” association, Wangari Maathai is the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. Wangari Maathai was born in 1940 in Kenya to a family of farmers. At school, she was so brilliant that she won a scholarship to study in the United States. After a doctorate in biology, she found her country impoverished and disfigured by deforestation. This was the beginning of her activist work: with the conviction that “each tree planted is a hope for peace”, she founded the “Green Belt” movement in 1977, which has allowed more than 30 million trees to be planted to prevent the desertification of villages and soil erosion, factors in the impoverishment of rural populations. This awareness that respect for the environment has a direct influence on human development, as well as her political fights for human rights, earned her a Nobel Prize in 2004. “I have always thought,” she says, “that our action is not limited to planting trees. It must allow people to understand that, by protecting their environment, it is themselves, their lives and their future that they are protecting.” Kenyans who admire her courageous positions and her ecological fight have affectionately nicknamed her Mama Miti (“mother of trees” in Swahili).

2 to 7 years