Goals of the Green Belt Movement

The Green Belt Movement clearly publicized its goals, pushing the importance of short-term goals to create tangible success stories and show the correlation between women, the environment, and sustainable development. The organization, under the spirit of self-reliance and empowerment, Wangari Maathai and the GBM sought to combat soil erosion by establishing public green belts and fuel wood plots. The following lists the exact short-term goals printed on the GBM’s general printers in the 1980’s:

  1. The Development of a positive image for women.
  2. The promotion of tree planting and agroforestry amongst small-scale farmers (for fuelwood).
  3. The creation of employment for the handicapped and school leavers in their own communities.
  4. The training of women as cultivators of seedlings.
  5. To generate income for women.
  6. To educate populations on the inter-relationship of environment and other issues, such as food production and health.
  7. To curb rural migration to urban centers for better prospects.
  8. To promote environmental education.
  9. To promote soil conservation.

 

All of the short-term goals encouraged an inclusive constituency and bolstered immediate solutions. By focusing on tree planting and educational activities with a self-help model, the movement was able to expand at a rapid pace and empower Kenyan citizens, primarily women. GBM’s mission is to “strive for better environmental management, community empowerment, and livelihood improvement using tree-planting as an entry point,” to achieve this objective the organization established 17 long-term goals.

  1. To advert desertification processes through tree planting and soil and water conservation.
  2. Promote environmental conservation and sustainable development.
  3. Promote indigenous tree and shrubs which are rapidly becoming extinct as promotion of exoctic species intensifies.
  4. Promote a positive image of women by projecting their leading role in national development.
  5. Encourage indigenous initiatives to restore self-confidence in a people overwhelmed by foreign “experts”.
  6. Promote the protection and maintenance of the environment through seminars, conferences, workshops, etc.
  7. Develop replicable methodology for rural development.
  8. Carry out research in conjunction with Universities and research institutions.
  9. Strengthen and empower groups and staff through training and informing.
  10. Encourage women to make their own decisions, identify their own objectives and strategies and implement them in order to benefit from their labour.
  11. Provide a Forum at which the voices of those working at the grassroots (especially women) can articulate preferences by words and deeds.
  12. Emphasize humans as a main resource, as compared to funds, formal education or specialization.
  13. Seek to encourage participants to empower themselves, strengthen their self-confidence and self-esteem and cultivate pride in their cultural values and heritage.
  14. Strive to share the experience gained in the GBM with others in the region and the world.
  15. Address itself to the poorer sectors of societies and endeavour to alleviate poverty.     
  16. In its efforts of re-afforestation GBM is contributing to reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the prospects of climate change.
  17. Encourage spiritual and cultural values which link people with their roots and with Nature and God. Our traditional values and systems have been eroded, undervalued and destroyed in the process of colonization and modern mode of development. In that process many people have become economically, socially, and politically marginalized. It is the spiritual and cultural values which can contribute toward restoration of self-confidence, self-empowerment and recognition of the person as the greater resource to self and country.

The goals are intertwined with themes of women’s rights, environmental justice, education, poverty, de-colonialism, and intersectionality, all aimed at protecting the natural environment while increasing the human condition of primarily women, but also the uneducated and disabled. The GBM cultivated a sense of collective responsibility and consciousness that successfully connected environmental activism with struggles for women’s rights and political liberalization. The organization was able to flourish and maintain its objectives by having both short and long term goals for its members to address.