This week's Friday Icon is Wangari Maathai who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2004 for founding the green belt movement in Kenya in 2004. The movement has provided much needed work for tens of thousands of poor Kenyan women and has resulted in over 10m trees been planted to prevent soil erosion.

Born in 1940 in Nyeri, Wangari, she trained as a scientist in the US before returning to Kenya to do a PhD. She gained worldwide attention in 1998 by helping to defeat plans by Kenya's president Daniel Arap Moi, to clear hundreds of acres of forest for luxury housing. Jailed several times by previous administrations, she was elected to parliament in 2002 and is now environment minister. In January 2007 Maathai hosted the Global Young Greens conference in Nairobi, where more than 120 young delegates of environmental, civil rights, peace and social justice youth movements as well as youth organisations of green parties from all over the world. She recently co-hosted the Global Greens Nairobi conference in Sao Paulo in May of this year, which was attended by over 1,000 Greens from dozens of Green Parties around the planet