Anita Soina, a member of the Maasai tribe in Kenya, is a young and dynamic fighter against climate change in her country. At barely twenty-four years old, author of the book “The Green War”, she is the paradigm of an African generation committed to its future. She defends that Africa must develop its path towards sustainability from the roots of its culture in the face of the imposition of solutions imported from developed countries. For this reason, he actively works in the villages of his country to raise awareness among the population, especially young people, who make up 64% of Kenya's inhabitants, in adopting the best solutions to combat drought, through management. of water, the regeneration of forest masses and the selection of the most suitable crops. She works on the ground but also from activism, with her own NGOs, and from politics. She ran in the last parliamentary elections for a green party. She was not elected, but now she wants to run again because she believes that we must also try to solve the problems from within.
“It is not enough to demonstrate to protest and criticize politicians,” he says. In addition to her work as an activist and social educator, she also works with the presidency of the Environment Committee of the Senate of her country. She believes that if there is political will it is easy to all go together: the private sector, the public sector, civil society organizations, and society as a whole. She understood this when she attended her first global climate conference, COP 26 in 2021, in Glasgow. This week Anita Soina was the guest speaker at a new edition – the sixteenth – of the SOS-sustainability cycle periodically organized by La Vanguardia to publicize the activities, reflections and proposals to save the planet carried out by activists, environmentalists and leading environmental experts.
In an extensive conversation with the deputy director of La Vanguardia, Enric Sierra, broadcast via streaming on the web last Wednesday, the young activist explained the development of her multiple and diverse activities in defense of the environment.
Anita Sonia comes from a community of Maasai shepherds, known for their spectacular clothing, which she wears as a vindication of her origins. The Maasai are one of the communities most affected by climate change, which explains her environmental awareness and activism since she was seventeen years old. She is a World Youth Champion for Sanitation and Water for All, which is a United Nations-sponsored alliance that advocates for water, sanitation and hygiene around the world. She also runs an NGO with environmental and climate purposes focused on climate education in schools, rural areas and leadership spaces, as well as the Soina Foundation.
From the organization Spice Warriors Environment
“We choose indigenous or fruit trees, which are nutritious and help alleviate hunger, and we ask the children to take care of them and water them. So far, the project has been implemented in more than fifty schools and we have planted 12,000 trees, 80% of which survive.”
“The problem – laments Anita Soina – is that while we plant trees and wait for them to grow, large areas are deforested in different regions of both countries. Communities lack knowledge and laws are not strict enough to prevent this. It is discouraging, especially for young people, to see that we advance five steps but take thirty steps backwards. But we have to continue.” In some arid and semi-arid regions they also participate in a project with other partners on natural regeneration carried out by farmers themselves using indigenous techniques.
Anita Soina and her collaborators focus their work on schools, “I love education,” she says, “because it can take us far. The problems we have in schools are the lack of water, food and the high temperatures that are reached during the day that make it difficult to teach in these classrooms.”
Through the Soina Foundation, it has also promoted the “Adopt a school” program. Donors are sought and schools and teachers are supported to address solutions to different problems. The school, he explains, is a key institution and it is easy to get to. Next, we empower the entire community: teachers, parents, and neighborhood residents. With this we try to empower the entire community, starting by helping teachers and then extending the different activities that the foundation also promotes, such as smart agriculture, food production or improving resilience. We also offer mentoring activities to help girls and boys who want to advance and pursue a career, but do not have references. So we look for leaders from the same community and take them to schools so that boys and girls understand that they themselves have the possibility of growing up and becoming the change they want to see in society.”
“We are not looking for a young man who does millions of things,” he points out. We want millions of young people to each do something, whatever they can, because in this way we will change the world, and that unites a lot.”
She explains that the first time she visited a school, before the UN Water Conference, was to bring girls menstrual products, give talks on menstrual hygiene, and education on sexual and reproductive health. “But when she arrived,” she says, “we realized that the challenges were multiple, such as lack of water and hunger. Many rivers have dried up. What really motivated us to continue was the passion that the children gave off: they were still going to school, they were happy, they were still learning.”
“We went there,” he adds, “to bring them what we thought they needed. When we arrived, however, we realized that that was not what they needed. And that is the same thing that happens in global spaces when addressing climate change. You see that the most affected communities are left behind, and they are not brought to the table to talk about it. But the beautiful thing is that we, as citizens and as young people, have the ability to make a difference.” In his opinion, Eurocentric solutions are not Afrocentric solutions. Both our leaders and those of developed countries do it wrong.”
Anita Soina explains that they try to talk a lot with girls to protect them from early marriages, female genital mutilation or where to report a case of sexual violence. The Maasai are a community of shepherds. The drought has caused the death of many animals and some marry off their very young daughters in exchange for heads of cattle. “We try – he says – to talk to them and ask the authorities to protect them, while at the same time we teach parents to adapt to climate change to find alternatives to giving their daughters in marriage to recover the livestock.
“Our intervention consists,” he says, “in making it understood that we do not want to abandon our culture, but we do want to introduce structures that, among other things, allow rainwater to be collected and stored. “Poverty, however, makes the transition to these structures difficult because it is expensive for many communities.”
Among the Maasai, men are shepherds and take care of livestock. Everything else is left to the women. Anita Soina explains that she finds a lot of receptivity in them. Women are great defenders of the environment. “We trained a woman in smart agriculture, vertical farming, gardens and how to grow vegetables with little water, and she trained 87 more women from her community on her own, who have then gone on their own to other villages to teach more women . Is awesome. We also empower them economically so that they learn to produce food and earn money themselves.”
She had the opportunity to study at the institute and, after that, from the age of 17, she wanted to contribute to improving society. She learned about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and saw that it would be easy for her to work on SDG 13, climate action. She started planting trees with a group of friends while she was studying for a university degree, and her desire for knowledge led her to attend conferences related to climate change. There she began the career of this brave “warrior” against climate change.
