Vanessa Nakate

Vanessa Nakate was born in Kampala, Uganda, on 15 November 1996. In January 2019, inspired by Greta Thunberg, she began a solitary climate strike outside the gates of the Ugandan Parliament — week after week, often standing alone with a hand-painted sign. As the first Fridays For Future climate activist in Uganda, she soon realised that the voices of young Africans, who face some of the harshest effects of a crisis they did little to cause, were missing from the global conversation. So she founded the Rise Up Movement to amplify climate activists from across the continent.

In January 2020 she travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and joined four other young activists — Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer and Isabelle Axelsson — for a press conference. When the Associated Press published its photo from the event, Nakate, the only Black activist present, had been cropped out entirely. Her reply travelled around the world: "You didn't just erase a photo, you erased a continent. But I am stronger than ever." The AP apologised, removed the cropped image and pledged to expand diversity training — and a quiet, dignified protest became a global lesson about who gets seen.

Rather than let that moment define her, Nakate turned attention into action. Through Rise Up she launched the Vash Green Schools Project, installing solar panels and clean, eco-friendly cookstoves in rural Ugandan schools — replacing the charcoal and firewood stoves and kerosene lamps whose smoke harms children's eyes and lungs. Solar light lets teachers prepare lessons after dark; cleaner stoves mean cleaner air. It is climate justice made tangible, one schoolyard at a time.

In September 2022, UNICEF appointed Nakate as a Goodwill Ambassador, recognising her advocacy for the children and communities hit hardest by drought, floods and food insecurity. She said her first task would be to bring the voices of children and marginalised people into the rooms where they had so long been left out — the same conviction that once kept a teenager standing alone outside Parliament with a cardboard sign.