Foresters Without Development || Exercise, Grade - 11 NEB

Foresters Without Development The Green Belt Movement started in my backyard. I was involved in a political campaign with a man I was married to; I was trying to see what I could do for the people who were helping us during our campaign, people who came from poor communities. I decided to create jobs for them: cleaning their constituency, planting trees and shrubs, cleaning the homes of the richer people in the communities, and getting paid for those services.  That never worked, because poor people wanted support right away, and I didn’t have money to pay them before the people we were working for had paid me. So I dropped the project but stayed with the idea. Then, in 1976, two years after the first backyard idea, I was invited to join the National Council of Women of Kenya. We were into the UN’s “women’s decade”, and I got exposed to many of the problems women were facing: problems of firewood, malnutrition, lack of food and adequate water, unemployment, and soil erosion.  Quite often…