Ellyanne Wanjiku co-organized a children’s climate summit in Nairobi. The 13-year-old says she wants to change the world. Her role model: a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Even if the topic is serious, you can dance in between. Young climate protectors, mainly from Kenya, have arranged to meet in the capital, Nairobi, before the big Africa climate summit starts there. For three days they talk about what their generation can do to stop climate change. Right in the middle is Ellyanne Wanjiku, 13 years old. She helped organize this children’s summit and also gives the opening speech.
She says that she traveled to Paris in June when French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to discuss a global financial pact against poverty and climate change. “I was invited because they wanted children from the Global South, where people are suffering the most from the changes,” she says. “In the US and Europe, they don’t feel the consequences as much. Here we experience droughts, cattle die and people have no income.”
Ellyanne Wanjiku also does a practical job for the climate: she planted trees in Nairobi.
Wanjiku plants trees
Wanjiku started early to get involved in environmental protection. Her plan is to plant many trees. She has since done so in several countries. Also in a park in Nairobi: In the middle of the city center between expressways and skyscrapers there is now a green oasis through which a river flows. The young climate activist leads to a dense bamboo forest on the shore. The plants are supposed to help keep the riverbed clean, she explains.
Her father, a molecular biologist, and her mother, who works in the medical field, now support her. But it wasn’t always like that: “At first my mother wanted to discourage me. She said that this commitment would never get me to Harvard. But I said that I wanted to change the world.”
Her role model: Wangari Maathai
Aiming high for a 13-year-old. But Wanjiku is now working with several environmental organizations. At the African climate summit, she wants to make her position clear to representatives from all over the world. “After the climate summits, we always hear that something needs to be done. But then the adults don’t do anything. This time we want to see action,” she complains. “We no longer have the time not to take climate change seriously.”
Wanjiku is in contact with young climate activists around the world. But the African perspective is particularly important to her. That’s why she doesn’t see herself as a successor to activists like Greta Thunberg: “She’s a role model for other children, but I rather admire Wangari Maathai” – the Kenyan “savior of the trees”, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her commitment to protecting the forests got. After all, Wanjiku is already taking the first steps to follow in her footsteps.
Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her commitment. She is considered an important figure in Kenyan women’s emancipation and has been Deputy Minister for Environmental Protection since 2002. Maathai died of complications from cancer in 2011.