Maathai was born in Kenya in 1940. In 1960, she won a Kennedy scholarship to study in America and earned a master's degree in biology and became the first woman in East Africa to earn a Ph.D. Returning to Kenya in 1966, she was shocked at the degradation of the forests and the farmland caused by deforestation. She introduced the idea of planting trees through citizen foresters in 1976, and called this new organization the Green Belt Movement (GBM). She continued to develop GBM into broad-based, grassroots organization whose focus was women's groups planting of trees in order to conserve the environment and improve their quality of life. More than 20 million trees have been planted in Kenya and all over East Africa.