Mr. Nnimmo Bassey

Mr. Nnimmo Bassey is a professional architect, civil rights activist, author, poet and consummate environmental rights advocate. He is Executive Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), an environmental think-tank and advocacy organization he founded in 2011 for promoting the environment, climate justice and food sovereignty in Africa. 

He served on the Board of Nigeria’s Civil Liberties Organization (CLO), and was a co-founder of Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria). Mr. Bassey has served in the committees of both Oilwatch International and the regional arm, Oilwatch Africa which has membership in more than 15 African countries. 

He has had to pay for his non-conformist stance on environmental justice as he was “physically kept out” of a meeting at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, despite being accredited for the event.

He was named as one of TIME magazine’s Heroes of the Environment in 2009 and also emerged a Laureate of the Right Livelihood Award. In 2012, he won the prestigious Thoroft Rafto Memorial Prize, an award that was famously regarded as the Environment Nobel Prize.