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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | A spirit unbowed by Barun Roy

A spirit unbowed by Barun Roy

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published Published on Oct 20, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 20, 2011

The death recently in Nairobi of Kenyan environmental crusader and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai brings to mind the work of another development activist and Nobel peace laureate (2006), Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh. Their fields were different but their goals were the same: empowering poor, ordinary women for social and economic growth.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has gone to three women who are working to bring about major changes in their own societies: President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, her compatriot Leymah Gbowee, and pro-democracy campaigner Tawakkol Karman of Yemen. What Maathai has done in Africa and Yunus in South Asia has certainly helped nations discover the potential of women power as an instrument of societal change.

When Yunus started doling out small amounts of loans to poor village women in Bangladesh, back in 1976, to help them earn additional incomes for their families, he was taking a gamble. But, as we all know now, the gamble has well paid off. Today, 98 per cent of Grameen Bank’s 8.35 million borrowers are women, engaged in a wide variety of livelihood activities and having their own bank accounts and savings. Grameen has given them a sense of pride and social belonging they never had before, and helped them cross levels of poverty they never thought would be possible.

Maathai’s had the same calculation in mind: when something has got to be done, it’s wiser to depend on women, since they’re simply more responsible and by far the best organisers and motivators. Today, the Green Belt Movement she so successfully pioneered, about the same time as Yunus’s Grameen, has benefited over 9 million women in Kenya alone, who have discovered through it a new purpose in life.

Maathai’s approach was simple, as was Yunus’: help women improve their livelihoods, and the rest will follow. While he did this by providing micro-credit without collateral, she strove to increase women’s access to resources, like firewood for cooking and clean water. If women could grow their own firewood, fencing material, fodder, and food, she calculated, depredations on Kenya’s fast dwindling forests could be stopped while its barren landscape could receive a much-needed cover of green.

Under the programme, which has achieved great success at home and inspired similar movements elsewhere in Africa, especially in the Congo Basin, individual farmers are encouraged to plant trees on their own land. Women form groups to produce and distribute seedlings, raised from seeds collected from forests and fields, and, once the seedlings are actually planted, receive compensation. This acts as the motivation to drive the movement forward and encourages women from one village to go out to surrounding areas and convince others to plant trees, too.

As Maathai writes in her highly absorbing autobiography, Unbowed, “This was a breakthrough, because it was now communities empowering one another for their own needs and benefit. In this way, the process replicated itself several thousand times.” It also went on to create what she describes as a host of “foresters without diplomas”. Her message to village women was simple: you don’t need a diploma in forestry to dig a hole in the ground, put in a tree in it, and water and nurture it, so go ahead and do it. The message struck home, and spread quickly.

The message seemed also to have provided a new ground for bonding in Kenya’s conflict-ridden tribal society. “When the seedlings are ready for planting,” Maathai writes in her autobiography, “we invite other communities and give them seedlings. We tell them these are trees of peace. We are not interested in conflict, we want to foster peace.” There were occasions, and they were many, when rival communities joined her in planting trees on the very lands they had long been fighting over.

It’s not surprising that Maathai came increasingly to regard the green Belt Movement as a laboratory of sorts to experiment with a holistic approach to development, dealing with problems on the ground while addressing their individual and systemic causes. This became her particular concern since the ethnic violence in 1991 and often brought her into direct conflict with the government former dictator Daniel Arap Moi. Her crusade, thus, acquired a pronounced political character that Yunus’s never had.

Her battles to save Uhuru Park in the centre of Nairobi from commercial developers, stop government plans to grab forests and distribute the land among its political allies, obtain the release of political prisoners held without any charges, or secure the establishment of multiparty democracy made Maathai an immensely popular figure and a legend in her lifetime. Nothing – imprisonment, torture, insults, or personal attacks – could budge her from her goal. “If you don’t foresee the danger and see only the solution, then you can defy anyone,” she often used to say.


The Business Standard, 20 October, 2011, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/barun-royspirit-unbowed/453084/


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