The Times publication/magazine last week released a list of the most influential emerging people in the world dubbed TIMES100 who are shaping the future of our world.
These included a host of big names especially celebrities such as singer Dua Lipa, Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford and among these was a Ugandan climate activist known as Vanessa Nakate.
Nakate who graduated from Makerere Business School in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree of business administration in marketing became concerned with the unsual high temperatures in Uganda and started rallying fellow country men to no avail on how to observe climate control.
Vanessa who got inspired by 18 year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thurnbag started her own campaign against climate change in Uganda and Africa at large in January 2019 and would be seen protesting alone on the gates of Parliament.
However, as fate would have it, fellow youth started heeding out to her cry via social media and soon joined hands with her to push the struggle of conserving climate in and around the country and their first mission was to save the Congo forests that were and are still being heavily deforested.
She started her own NGO known as Youth for Africa and the Africa Rise up movement. In December 2019, she was one of the few speakers given a chance to speak at the COP25 in Spain. Together with other youth in 2020, they wrote a letter to the World Economic Forum in Davos calling upon different entities and governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
She also got a chance in October 2020 to speak at the Desmond Tutu International Peace lecture urging African leaders to rise up and address the issue of climate change before it became more adverse.
Nakate has also started the Green Schools Project with an aim of turning all schools in Uganda to solar energy and eco friendly stoves that preserve climate in the country.
Nakate who was also recognized in 2020 by the BBC100 women is destined for historical greatness just as mentioned by the TIMES’ editorial director below.
“Everyone on this list is poised to make history,” says Dan Macsai, editorial director of the TIME100. “And in fact, many already have.” Indeed, when we told Jessica Byrd, who has helped shape the movement for electoral justice, that she was going to be included on this year’s TIME100 Next, she shared that she was “very, very moved” to receive another recognition from TIME—the first being in 2015 when, at a challenging moment in her life, she was named to a list of rising Black leaders. Two months after that, “catapulted by the public visibility and support for my work through that list,” Byrd says she “felt the wind at my back” and started her firm Three Point Strategies, which went on to work with such clients as Stacey Abrams and the Movement for Black Lives. “And the rest, as they say, is history.“
