Women are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve.

I have seen a lot of men, for example, who will make a will and include their daughters whether they are married or not. And perhaps the greatest change of attitude is that today, at least in Kenya, if you don't send your child to school - unless it's a matter of poverty or religion, and it is not that there no schools - then people wonder, "why the hell don't you send your children to school?" Now that's a very big jump from when I was going to school and educating girls was an exception to the rule.

It is important to nurture any new ideas and initiatives which can make a difference for Africa.

And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now.

I have always felt that perhaps women have sometimes almost embraced the same values as men, and the same character as men, because they are in the men's world, and they are trying to fit into a system that men have created. And maybe in truth when there is a critical mass of women who play that role in governments, then we will see whether women can really manage power in a way that is less destructive than the way that men have used power.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.

The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment.