On a windswept ridge in Laikipia County, you can hear the hum of bees long before you see the women tending the hives. They laugh between instructions, their hands dusted in pollen, faces creased by sun and resilience. This is not a scene from a documentary—it’s everyday life for women in the Laikipia who have taken up beekeeping as both a climate adaptation and a livelihood. Big3Africa posted months ago, on the shift from charcoal dependency to honey entrepreneurship. It wasn’t flashy. It was a quiet revolution.
Across Kenya and the broader African continent, the story repeats itself in thousands of local tongues, whispered under thorn trees, sung at water points, and documented in pixels by those who are watching closely. And time after time, it is women who stand at the center—nurturing, organizing, resisting, innovating. Not because someone permitted them to lead, but because survival demanded it.
In Nyeri, young Elizabeth Wathuti knelt to plant a tree as a child and found her life’s purpose in that simple act. Her journey reflects a truth we’ve seen in story after story: that climate action often begins with small, sacred gestures. Elizabeth’s Green Generation Initiative is more than just a tree-planting campaign—it’s a reclamation of hope by and for youth, a rising tide rooted in ancestral reverence for the land.
Hundreds of kilometers away, in Mukuru kwa Reuben, Charlot Magayi once sold charcoal to survive. Now, she builds clean-burning stoves—affordable, life-saving solutions that reduce indoor air pollution by 90%. Her Mukuru Clean Stoves, crowned by the Earthshot Prize, carry the slogan: “She saved my lungs.”
But Charlot isn’t alone. Big3Africa recently featured women embracing sustainable solutions when it comes to energy in the feature we did on Progress and Challenges in Kenya’s Clean Energy Quest. In Bomet, Kenya, Gladys Chelegat continues to use a three-stone fire despite chronic smoke injuries because she can’t afford cleaner alternatives. While Purity Ndegwa in Nyeri—a retired civil servant—shifted her family’s cooking, heating, and lighting to biogas in 2019, demonstrating how renewable energy can flow from farm to kitchen.
Even more compelling is the 2025 Big3Africa story “Clean Cooking Revolution to Combat Climate Change,” highlighting Awuor Dorothy Otieno and her social enterprise, Nyalore Impact Limited. Since 2016, she has built clean cookstoves from recycled biomass, introduced electric pressure cookers, and launched a pay-as-you-go model, making modern cooking accessible even in rural home kitchens. out fear.”
Fear is something Phyllis Omido knows well. In Owino Uhuru, the scent of lead smelting poisoned not only the air but the children’s blood. She spoke up. They called her trouble. She kept speaking. They threatened her life. She persisted. Her courage didn’t just shut down a toxic factory; it forced the nation to reconsider who bears the burden of progress. Phyllis revealed through various platforms what mainstream stories often missed—the emotional exhaustion of environmental justice work, and how often women carry it without safety nets.
In Kisumu, Lake Victoria laps against eroding shores, and Rahmina Paulette walks its edge with a clipboard and quiet fury. She’s 19. She’s organized more cleanups than birthdays, spoken on more panels than weddings attended. She doesn’t have time to wait. Her activism is urgent because her ecosystem is collapsing in real time.
But these are only the names we know. Behind the camera, Big3Africa has followed dozens of lesser-known women transforming landscapes: Samburu pastoralists restoring degraded rangelands through rotational grazing; women’s cooperatives in Baringo practicing climate-smart millet farming; and Maasai midwives who blend birth rituals with lessons on tree planting and clean water.
In Turkana, they weren’t just beneficiaries of food aid during drought—they were mapping dry riverbeds, advising on borehole locations, and starting community seed banks. In Nairobi’s Eastlands, they were coding apps to track flooding and helping elderly residents evacuate before storms.
And perhaps most striking: their work often goes uncredited. Not because it’s small, but because it’s shared. Many of the women we meet don’t ask to be heroes. They want impact, not headlines. Still, in the quiet corners of Kenya’s landscapes—where policies don’t always reach and global attention flickers—they persist.
But persistence is not enough. These women need more than applause. They need climate finance that reaches them directly. They need land rights, digital training, mobile irrigation kits, access to markets, and a seat at every table where climate futures are decided.
At Big3Africa, we’ve learned this: climate change doesn’t just challenge ecosystems—it challenges justice, memory, and culture. And when you listen to the women responding to it, you realize they are not just protecting the environment. They’re protecting the stories that hold communities together.
If we are to build a future where Africa thrives, we must fund, amplify, and follow the women who are already doing the work.
They’re not waiting for tomorrow. They are planting it—one tree, one stove, one lake cleanup at a time.
