Our #OnePerson for July 2025 is Amara Nwuneli
Amara Nwuneli is a young Nigerian environmental activist, storyteller, and changemaker who is passionate about restoring green spaces and promoting community-led climate action. At just 17, she founded Preserve Our Roots, a youth-led NGO and social advocacy movement focused on environmental restoration, education, and policy influence.
Through Preserve Our Roots, Amara has mobilised young people across Nigeria to take climate action through workshops, clean-ups, documentaries, and hands-on community projects. Whether it’s leading beach clean-ups, tree-planting drives, or youth activism boot camps, her goal is to make climate action practical, accessible, and part of everyday culture and policy.
In 2025, Amara won the Africa regional prize of The Earth Prize, a global environmental sustainability competition for teenagers. Her project turned a waste dump in Ikota, Lagos into a community playground built from recycled tyres, metal scraps, and reclaimed wood. The playground is now a lively space where children can play and learn. She also planted over 300 flood-resistant trees and led environmental workshops for the local community.
Her vision is to expand this model across Lagos and eventually build a Central Park dedicated to recreation, learning, and environmental awareness.
Amara’s work also spans storytelling and the arts. She wrote the book For We Are Curious, published in December 2022. She directed documentaries including Behind Your Screens, featured in an international youth ocean awareness contest in 2024, and her award-winning documentary The Heat of Change, which premiered in December 2023 and was named first runner-up in the Best Documentary category at the Xposure International Film Awards.
She has featured in the Netflix film Coming From Insanity, crafted policy proposals on climate-resilient infrastructure with her Senate group, and interned across law, media, and publishing firms. She also mentors underprivileged youth, fundraises for displaced communities, and hosts leadership camps.
Her work brings together creativity, advocacy, culture, history, and policy rooted in lived experience.
Amara’s story shows that leadership is not about age. It is about courage, creativity, and action. She has turned waste into opportunity and is inspiring a movement built on hope, learning, and transformation.
Let us celebrate Amara Nwuneli as proof that one person can make a difference and inspire others to do the same.