11-year old Ellyanne Chlystun-Githae is saving the world, one tree at a time

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11-year old Ellyanne Chlystun-Githae is saving the world, one tree at a time

Hello readers. Welcome to #Women4theClimate on CleanbuildVoices!

It’s another Wednesday and we’re excited for you to meet our crush of the day. We’ve got an interesting twist for today’s edition.

Our crush is 11-year old Ellyanne Chlystun-Githae who is an environmentalist and Africa’s Youngest Climate Change Ambassador in Kenya.

She is the founder of Children With Nature, going to schools to educate students on climate change, deforestation, plastic pollution, and the blue ocean economy.

Ellyanne’s interest in tree-planting was greatly piqued in 2015 at the young age of 4 after doing a project in Kindergarten on World Heroes which included Martin Luther King Jr, Wangari Maathai, Barack Obama, Henry Wanyoike among others.

She particularly became interested in Wangari Maathai (founder of The Green Belt Movement and the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize) who, according to her, believed in one of the most important things in the world – tree planting.

To Ellyanne, projects like infrastructure development that causes the mass cutting of trees should be discouraged, and alternative measures like replanting times more trees cut.

As her way of contributing towards mitigating deforestation, she has set up nurseries in over 70 schools, planted over 300 trees so far and thousands more trees in group activities, targeting to plant hundreds more with students from various schools in Kenya.

Since January 2018, Ellyanne has taken students, especially from slum schools, to visit the United Nations Environment headquarters and World Agro-Forestry for exposure and to learn the science behind trees. She started a tree seedlings project in schools targeting to grow about 400,000 tree seedlings which will be used for tree planting exercises.

In 2017 she was invited to the United Nations General Assembly as the youngest delegate where she learned more about climate change and met leaders, ambassadors, and directors from all over the world. She was also invited by UNEP Nairobi in 2017 for the celebrations of World Environment Day.

In 2018 she was nominated Kenya’s Youngest Mashujaa (Hero), an honor by the Government of Kenya. She was also nominated to be an ambassador for Kenya Climate Change, and Art & Essay Competition, a project by UNDP, USAID & Ministry of Environment.

She visited schools creating awareness and did campaigns using social media to reach more students and was awarded for it.

After attending United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA4) in 2019, the #GreeningKenya launch, as well as many other high-level meetings, Ellyanne realized there was a greater need to reach out to business and environment leaders in order to ensure their commitment to setting the right policies for nature and the climate change agenda.

For that reason, she started interviewing them to challenge them on their commitment to nature.

She has produced poems and music to create awareness of plastic pollution and the environment. She has also interviewed dignitaries in the quest to create awareness of climate change.

Watch this space as we’ll be back for another edition of our #Women4theClimate.

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