A charity helping Kenyan women work, grow seedlings, and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood, earn money for their work and gain a greater sense of agency and collaborative strength
Context
In the mid 1970s, Kenyan women reported that their streams were drying up, their food supply was less secure, and they had to walk increasingly far to gather firewood for fuel and fencing. This climate impact affected their social and economic livelihood, placing pressure on women for the reproductive labour of growing, harvesting, and cooking food, raising children, and caring for families.
Practice
In 1977 the Kenyan environmentalist and political campaigner Wangari Maathai, along with six other women, founded the Green Belt Movement (GBM). GBM is a charity that organises forestry projects and employs women to plant and manage woodlands used for their own communities’ food and firewood needs. Protecting the environment from industrial forestry, and improving livelihoods by directly employing women, GBM continues to this day, and has planted over 30 million trees, mostly in Kenya but also in several other African nations. GBM also oversees the construction and repair of water towers and irrigation systems, facilitates training for entrepreneurial activities such as goat farming, and campaigns against new construction projects such as a highway between Nairobi airport and a region of wetlands. In these combined ecological and political actions, GMB resists export patterns and encourages a localised economy to serve and secure the immediate community.
The GBM movement is exemplary in understanding equity along economic and ecological axes, with the needs of the planet closely aligned with the needs of the people depending on its lands and waters. Such an integrated understanding of planetary and human needs chimes with recent economic theories such as Doughnut Economics. GBM’s emphasis on women’s reproductive labour, meanwhile, resonates with material feminist and ecofeminist arguments that have called for gender equity when discussing economic output so that women’s labours cannot be exploited and rendered invisible in GDP. As the climate emergency worsens, movements like GBM, Zenab for Women in Development, and Women Environment Programme Nigeria grow in importance as grassroots activations of eco-intersectional justice.