It’s a big week in the Tom Brady-Gisele Bundchen household. Brady and the Patriots take on the Denver Broncos the Denver Tim Tebows in the NFL divisional playoffs.
And his wife, a United Nations Environment Programme Goodwill Ambassador, is back from her first official visit to Africa. The iconic Gisele Bündchen, went to the grassroots level in Kenya to experience the reality of energy poverty and to see how Kenyans are transforming their lives by accessing sustainable energy.
“Energy affects everything. Children can study at night when they have access to electricity. If we can bring electricity to everyone, we can help people to survive,” she told a press conference at the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi.
“It’s unjust if people do not have access to electricity. Energy for all is achievable. Just 2% of global investment is needed,” she added, speaking a week before the global launch of the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All (IYSEA).
Ms. Bündchen’s visit to Kenya took her to Kibera, East Africa’s largest slum, to look at biogas centers (turning human waste into power), to Kisumu, in western Kenya, where she took part in collecting firewood and learned about fuel-efficient cook stoves and to the Mount Kenya area where micro-hydro power is bringing electricity to over 2,000 households.
“We don’t hear about this and yet the solutions are so simple,” added Ms. Bündchen, who has recently been named the ‘world’s greenest celebrity’. “When we come out of our bubbles and travel, you experience what I did in Kenya and it’s amazing how we can change our viewpoints You ask what can we do in our daily lives to make change. Everybody can help in a different way,” she said.
“She speaks for the issues and she speaks from the heart. We were lucky to get her as a Goodwill Ambassador. It’s important to go out and meet people, which is part of making someone a great ambassador who can in turn communicate to millions of people that, for example, sustainable energy for all is possible—that it is one powerful way of motivating and catalyzing positive change in the run-up to Rio+20 in June this year,” said UN Under Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner
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