The African Development Foundation (ADF) today joins the people of Kenya and people around the world in congratulating Ms. Wangari Maathai on receiving the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. It is a tremendous and well-deserved recognition that speaks to Ms. Maathai’s remarkable achievements as leader of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement.

ADF awarded a grant to Green Belt Movement in 1985 for a project that engaged Kenyan women in an innovative community-based reforestation initiative. Since that time, the Green Belt Movement has expanded across sub-Saharan Africa, sponsoring the planting of more than 30 million trees. This effort has provided rural women, who once spent hours every day searching for cooking fuel, with the essential resources, knowledge and skills they need to achieve ecologically sustainable development.

Ms. Maathai’s Nobel Peace Prize highlights the powerful role that women-led grassroots organizations across Africa and the developing world have played, and continue to play, in building broad-based foundations for prosperity, democracy and peace in the 21st century.

Click here for a printable PDF version of this statement.
 

Information on ADF's Grant Support for the Green Belt Movement

ADF awarded a grant of US $58,475 to the Green Belt Movement (GBM) to assist GBM in helping 100 rural Kenyan women participate in Kenya's Non-Governmental Organization Forum of 1985. In addition, ADF funds provided GBM with resources to produce a detailed documentary on the history of Kenya's struggles with deforestation and GBMs efforts to organize local, community-led reforestation projects. That documentary, "The Naked Earth," was released in 1986 and was used by GBM as an educational outreach tool in its successful campaign to create community-based reforestation groups across sub-Saharan Africa.

Click here to access an article written by Wangari Maathai for ADF in 1987 that details her early work with the Green Belt Movement.