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Introducing Wangari

Or why the finance world is still at odds with sustainability

Ari Joury, PhD
6 min readJan 5, 2024
Black-and-white photo of a globe surrounded by coins
Money runs the world. So why is lots of money not geared towards sustainability? Image generated by Leonardo AI

Wangari is about doing the right thing. About creating win-win-win situations, where financial institutions, their clients, and the planet all win. Such situations have been created in the past, but are still too rare.

Wangari aims to help bring more capital to businesses that serve the planet by equipping investors to leverage the full power of non-financial data. Not only does this approach help investors make more money, but it also helps the planet heal from the various wounds that humanity has inflicted upon it.

Our name is an hommage to Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan activist and laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She is known for founding the Green Belt Movement to plant more trees to help society and the planet.

Maathai’s whole life is a testament to standing up and doing the right thing, even if it has uncomfortable consequences in the short term. She was the first woman in Eastern Africa to receive a Ph.D. She lost access to housing after being denied the right to run for a public office in Kenya. She got incarcerated for protecting a public forest.

Although her actions brought her personal and financial hardship on more than one occasion, Maathai never backed down from causes she knew were…

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Ari Joury, PhD
Ari Joury, PhD

Written by Ari Joury, PhD

Founder of Wangari. Sustainable finance & ESG-financial modeling. Get all articles 3 days in advance: https://wangari.substack.com

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