The Wangari Maathai International School (WMIS) is a public international school in Berlin offering bilingual education in German and English. Established in 2017, WMIS builds on the successful international and bilingual educational model of the Nelson Mandela School, while having developed its own distinct and vibrant school community.

WMIS was founded particularly to serve children from internationally mobile families and brings together students from a wide range of national, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The school offers two classes per grade, allowing it to maintain a small, close-knit community in which students, families and staff know one another well.

The school first opened its doors in 2017 with a single Grade 1 class at Babelsberger Str. 24 in Berlin. Since then, WMIS has grown year by year and, in the 2026/27 school year, provides bilingual education from Grade 1 through Grade 10, encompassing both primary and middle school.

As WMIS continues to develop, plans are underway to extend the school’s educational pathway beyond Grade 10. The development of the upper secondary years leading to the Abitur, as well as an IB programme, is currently in planning, with the aim of providing students with a continuous international and bilingual educational pathway through to university entrance qualifications.

Despite its growth, WMIS has retained one of its defining characteristics: a welcoming, highly engaged and close-knit international school community. With just two classes per grade, families have the opportunity to become actively involved in school life, and the small school environment helps foster a strong sense of belonging among students, parents and staff.

More information about the school can be found on its official website: http://wangari-maathai-schule.de/.

About Wangari Maathai

The name of the school was chosen by the families of the school after the famous Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate, professor, scientist, environmental activist, women’s rights activist, human rights activist and green politician Prof. Dr. Wangari Maathai.

The official naming ceremony took place on 22 March 2019. In addition to representatives of the Federal Foreign Office and the Senate Administration of Berlin, participants included the then State Secretary Rackles and the Kenyan Ambassador H.E. Mr. Joseph K. Magutt.

Wangari Maathai was born on 01 April 1940 in the Nyeri District in the Kenyan Highlands. After her school time in a monastery school she received a scholarship for a study of biology in the USA (Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas). Her studies also took her to the universities of Pittsburgh, Giessen and Munich. In 1971, she was the first woman to receive a doctorate in East and Central Africa at the University of Nairobi. In the same year she became the first Professor of Veterinary Anatomy and later Dean of her Department at the University of Nairobi. 

In 1977 she launched the Green Belt Movement, a reforestation project to protect against erosion. Over the years, it has become a movement that is now active in 13 countries, has founded several hundred nurseries and planted several million new trees. Wangari became the central figure of identification for the women’s movement in Kenya. From 1976 to 1987 she was active in Kenya’s National Council of Women in Kenya. Between 1981-87 she was president of the council.

In the 1990s Maathai, whose commitment to environmental protection and women’s rights repeatedly put her in opposition to the then head of state Daniel Moi, became president. After Wangari Maathai unsuccessfully ran for parliament and president in 1997, she was elected to the Kenyan parliament in December 2002 for the “National Rainbow Coalition (NARC)” founded by several opposition parties. The NARC replaced the government of Daniel Moi, and the newly elected President Mwai Kibaki appointed Maathai as Deputy Minister for Environmental Protection. Maathai was the founder of the “Mazingira Green Party of Kenya” and is considered the first green politician in Africa to have made the leap into government.

In April 2004 she was awarded the international Petra Kelly Prize of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. In December 2014, Wangari Maathai was the first African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her commitment to “sustainable development, democracy and peace”. As early as 1984, she won the Right Livelihood Award (the so-called Alternative Nobel Prize) for her commitment to the Green Belt Movement.