The story of Vanessa Nakate starts in her final year at Makerere University Business School (MUBS) where she thought of building for the future and giving a helping hand for the future generations to have a better environment than the current one. As any other person, she had some climate change activists who inspired her to join the run.
“I started carrying out research about the problems faced by people in my country and climate change was the biggest threat,” she said.
She started by inventing her own means of conserving the environment, she started the “Fridays For The Future” climate strike in Uganda where she encourages fellow strikers not to eat lunch on Fridays to show their concern for the environment. Here she claims that over 90% of what is used to cook food in Uganda involves cutting down a tree and these include charcoal, firewood and other fossil fuels means of cooking.
“I realized it was of my concern to start up a climate strike if not two or three because I found out that even though there are very many means of cooking, people instead resort to use of firewood and charcoal, this increases its demand and leads to increased deforestation,” Vannessa told the Hive.
She has so far organised strikes for over 60 weeks on the theme of “Fridays For The Future.” Apart from this, she has also been creating awareness about destruction of forests for 77 days in a row now, holding cleaning activities, going to school and teaching pupils about climate change, installing solar and institutional stoves in schools, teaching people about climate change and how to mitigate it.
After her graduation last year as a Business Administration graduate, she instead first put her qualification aside to focus on how she can create more awareness on environmental conservation. She went ahead to spearhead the #SaveCongoRainforest campaign where very many people have adhered to it and it trended on Twitter for a very long time.
Her climate strikes have enabled her travel the world creating awareness and she has attended over 5 international conferences about climate change and she has always been among the panelists in these conferences. She is planning to start up a tree planting campaign whose commencement she is yet to announce.
As any other person, Ms Nakate has also had challenges and the biggest challenge she has ever got is the recent racism that she encountered at the hands of the US news site Associated Press when she attended a conference and she was cropped out of a picture with her other white peers.
She mostly uses her Twitter handle to create more awareness around the world and she has over 100k followers. You can also check her out @Vanessa_vash (Vanessa Nakate)
You must be logged in to post a comment.