Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo (b 1965 in Durban, South Africa) is a human rights and climate justice activist. He was International Executive Director of Greenpeace International (from 2009 through 2015) and Secretary General of Amnesty International (from 2018 through 2019). Naidoo served as the Secretary-General of CIVICUS, the international alliance for citizen participation, from 1998 to 2008. As a fifteen-year old, he organised students in school boycotts against the apartheid regime and its educational system in South Africa. Naidoo’s activism went from neighbourhood organising and community youth work to civil disobedience with mass mobilisations against the white controlled apartheid government. Naidoo is a co-founder of the Helping Hands Youth Organisation. He has written about his activism in this period in his memoirs titled, Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker. In the book Naidoo recounts the day of his mother’s suicide when he was just 15 and how it became a catalyst for his journey into radical action against the Nationalist Party’s apartheid regime.

Naidoo served as the Launch Executive Director of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace & Dignity (2016) and he was appointed as the Inaugural Global Ambassador in June 2020.^[8] He has also served the Global Call to Action Against Poverty and the Global Call for Climate Action (Tcktcktck.org) , which brings together environmental aid, religious and human rights groups, labour unions, scientists and others and has organised mass demonstrations around climate negotiations. Kumi Naidoo was most recently a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy He has lectured at Fossil Free University (2019 through 2021).  He has served as a Special Advisor to the Green Economy Coalition . Kumi is an Honorary Fellow at Magdalen College and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. Provided by Wikipedia