Wangari Maathai

She married Mwangi Mathai, in May 1969. The couple was blessed with three children. They parted ways in 1977 which was followed by a legal separation in 1979.

On September 25, 2011, she breathed her last dying out of complication arising from ovarian cancer.

A year after her death, Wangari Maathai Award was inaugurated to honour and commemorate an extraordinary woman who championed forest issues around the world.

Wangari Maathai was born as Wangari Muta on 1 April 1940 in the village of Ihithe in the central highlands of the colony of Kenya. Two years later, she shifted along with her parents to a farm near Rift Valley where her father had found work.

In 1947, she returned to Ihithe, for lack of educational opportunities at the farm. At the age of eight, she enrolled at the Ihithe Primary School and within three years, moved to St. Cecilia's Intermediate Primary School. It was during her years at St Cecilia that she became fluent in English and converted to Catholicism, thus taking up the surname Maathai.

Completing her preliminary education with the top grade in 1956, she gained admission at Loreto High School. In 1960, she was one of the 300 promising students selected to study in the United States.

She gained admission at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas, wherein she majored in biology. Finishing her BSc in 1964, she enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh to get an MSc in biology, which she attained in 1966.

During her tenure at the university, she was first exposed to environmental restoration by group of environmentalists who were looking to free the city from air pollution.

Concluding her studies, she returned to Kenya to take up the seat of a research assistant to a professor of zoology at the University College of Nairobi. However, the post was transferred to someone else due to gender and tribal biasness.

She finally found work under Professor Reinhold Hofmann in the microanatomy section of the newly established Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at University College of Nairobi

Following continuous persistence from Prof Hoffman, she relocated to Germany in 1967 to pursue a doctorate degree from the University of Giessen and University of Munich. Two years later, she returned to Nairobi to further continue her studies. She took up the post of the assistant lecturer at the University College of Nairobi.

In 1971, she became the first Eastern African woman to be awarded with a Ph.D. in veterinary anatomy. Her thesis work entailed development and differentiation of gonads in bovines

Her career graph witnessed an upward drift in the following years, as she first became a senior lecturer in anatomy, later on taking up the chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and finally becoming associate professor in 1977. It was while holding on to these significant positions that she fought against gender and tribal biasness, strongly raising her voice for equal rights of women.

Throughout her life and posthumously, she has received various awards and honors for her outstanding contribution as an environmentalist and activist. The most prominent of those include the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.

She was bestowed with one of France’s most honourable decorations, Legion d’honneur, in 2006.

She was awarded two honorary degrees, Doctor of Public Service by the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 and Doctor of Science by Syracuse University posthumously in 2013.