Leah Namugerwa, an enterprising 16-year-old from Uganda, is singlehandedly working hard to resolve her home country’s deforestation issue.
According to AfricaNews, forest coverage in Uganda has seen a sharp decline from 24% to just 8% since the 1990s. The teen says it’s her mission to get one million trees planted.
“I celebrated my birthday in 2019 by planting 200 trees. That is when I was turning 15-years-old and I did again last year when I was turning 16-years-old, I planted 500 trees”, Namugerwa told the news outlet.
Namugerwa encourages others to do the same through her social media pages. The inspirational teen has more than 30,000 followers on her Twitter and Instagram accounts alone.
“People are really taking on this green idea from all over the world, from the United States of America, Europe, Africa, Asia. I am getting requests from different people to take on this green idea. I have planted trees for ambassadors”, she added.
Namugerwa has created a lot of awareness during her relatively short stint as a climate activist, meeting foreign ambassadors and attending conferences in several countries, including Rwanda, Kenya, and Switzerland. She is also one of the most notable climate activists in the Fridays for Future movement.
#FridaysforFuture was started by Greta Thunberg. Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every Friday for three weeks to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis.
“Every time we carry out an activity we teach people; we sensitize people of the dangers. For example, when we are cleaning up, lake shore clean ups, you find that people keep on joining you and they stop polluting the lakes. Every time I am planting trees I get more and more people helping me to plant trees which shows that my activism is impacting the nation and all over the world.”
Support Leah Namugerwa by following her on Instagram.
