Climate Activist Spotlight: Elizabeth Wathuti

By Helen Gloege ’23

Staff Writer


Elizabeth Wathuti is a 26-year-old climate activist from Kenya. She is the founder of the Green Generation Initiative, which aims to plant fruit trees and focuses on “implementing environmental projects and activities with young people for a sustainable future,” as stated on their website. The site claims they have grown over 30,000 trees. This success has been completed in collaboration with Kenyan middle and high schools, and the website attributes the trees’ 98 percent survival rate to the students’ involvement in keeping them alive. 

According to an article Wathuti wrote in the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, one of her inspirations is the Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai. The Green Belt Movement, according to their website, has “planted over 51 million trees in Kenya” and aims to “promote environmental conservation” and “build climate resilience and empower communities.”

Wathuti is the recipient of the Wangari Maathai Scholarship award, which catapulted her into prominence in the field of African environmental conservation. Wathuti has gained internet recognition recently, and has been reported as going viral by Stylist after a speech she gave at the World Leaders Summit Opening Ceremony for the COP26. The COP26 website reported that the conference aim to bring together world leaders to discuss and commit to actions to combat climate change. Within the speech, Wathuti described the climate change-related conditions she and others are experiencing in Kenya. She brought the conversation to the broader impacts on Sub-Saharan Africa, noting that while the region has produced fewer emissions, the people living there are facing more severe effects of climate change earlier then developed countries. Wathuti ended the speech with a call to action to resolving climate change, saying to world leaders, “I believe in our ability to do what is right, if we let ourselves feel it in our hearts.”