Greengrants congratulates Anabela Lemos, Southern Africa Advisory Board member and winner of Mozambique’s first National Environmental Prize.
Lemos, of Justiça Ambiental, helped found one of the first environmental groups in Mozambique. In 1998, when she and her sister learned of a project to incinerate banned pesticides in unsafe cement kilns, they worked together with community members to campaign against the project. From this successful struggle, the nonprofit Livaningo, was born. She worked with Livaningo as a volunteer from 1998 to 2001, and served as deputy director from 2001 to 2004. Justiça Ambiental, which she founded in March 2004, works on issues of water quality, dam monitoring, environmental policy, renewable energy, pollution, and climate change.
Accepting the award, she said, “We cannot have peace, the eradication of poverty or sustainable development without taking the environment into consideration as the base of everything.”