The Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF)
Among the crowded field of environmental organizations operating in Nigeria, the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) stands out as one of the country’s most effective locally rooted voices on climate and ecological justice. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Benin City, Edo State, with a branch office in Abuja, HOMEF describes itself as an ecological think tank rather than a conventional service-delivery NGO. Its influence rests less on the scale of the projects it runs than on the intellectual and political weight it has built around a small number of interlinked issues — fossil fuel extraction, food sovereignty, and the rights of nature. Unlike many climate-focused NGOs that emerged out of international donor priorities, HOMEF grew directly out of decades of Nigerian environmental activism, giving it a credibility and grassroots reach that newer, donor-driven organizations often struggle to match.
Leadership
HOMEF was founded by Nnimmo Bassey, an architect, poet, and one of the most internationally recognized environmental justice campaigners to emerge from Africa. Before establishing HOMEF, Bassey spent twenty years, from 1993 to 2013, as executive director of Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria’s affiliate of Friends of the Earth, where he led campaigns against oil pollution and gas flaring in the Niger Delta and helped document the environmental devastation of Ogoniland. He went on to chair Friends of the Earth International from 2008 to 2012 and currently coordinates Oilwatch International, a global network monitoring the oil industry’s impact on communities. His recognitions include Time magazine’s Hero of the Environment (2009), the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Prize (2010), the Rafto Human Rights Award (2012), and Nigeria’s national honor as a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic (2014). Bassey remains HOMEF’s executive director today, and its day-to-day advocacy is carried forward by Joyce Brown, HOMEF’s Director of Programmes, who has become the most visible public face of its agroecology and anti-GMO campaigning across Nigerian states, alongside a notable advisory board of environmental justice campaigners drawn from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, the United States, and Ecuador.
Operations
HOMEF organizes its work around a handful of long-running programme tracks rather than a scattershot portfolio of short-term projects. Its Fossil Politics work continues the fight Bassey began at Environmental Rights Action, pressing for an end to gas flaring and contesting new oil and gas exploration, while increasingly mounting a sharp critique of carbon trading and REDD-plus forest-carbon schemes, which HOMEF argues expose African communities to green grabbing and the expropriation of emissions rights rather than genuine climate benefit. Its Hunger Politics and food-sovereignty work has become its highest-profile campaign in recent years: HOMEF and its partners in the GMO-Free Nigeria Alliance have organized coordinated rallies against the commercial release of genetically modified crops, including a nationwide mobilization across ten Nigerian states in December 2024 and a further rally and National Assembly petition in Abuja in December 2025, arguing that Nigeria’s biosafety approval process lacks adequate long-term risk assessment and that agroecology offers a more climate-resilient path for the country’s farmers. It backs this advocacy with its own research, including market surveys conducted in ten Nigerian cities in 2018, 2019, and 2023 that catalogued more than fifty imported packaged foods containing genetically modified ingredients already on Nigerian shelves. HOMEF also runs a Sustain-Ability Academy that trains farmers directly in agroecological techniques, publishes a quarterly magazine and a stream of position papers and books, and convenes community dialogues intended to let affected communities, rather than outside experts, define what environmental justice means in their own context.
Effectiveness
HOMEF’s effectiveness is best understood as that of an advocacy and agenda-setting organization rather than a large-scale programme implementer, and on that measure its record is substantial. It has repeatedly succeeded in inserting itself into national policy conversations that Nigeria’s government would otherwise have closed to civil society, most visibly through the GMO petition process, where its coalition’s pressure contributed to a 2024 recommendation from the House of Representatives on GMO regulation, and through its recurring seat at national climate delegations and forest-carbon policy dialogues, where it is regularly quoted challenging the design of carbon markets rather than simply endorsing them. Its credibility is reinforced by Bassey’s personal stature: an executive director who has chaired Friends of the Earth International and sits on the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature gives HOMEF a level of access to international climate forums and global media that few Nigerian NGOs can claim, translating directly into leverage at home. HOMEF also benefits from continuity — its core positions on fossil fuels, GMOs, and carbon markets have remained consistent for well over a decade, so journalists, legislators, and fellow civil society organizations treat it as a reliable reference point rather than a group chasing whatever theme donors are currently funding. Its multi-year market surveys and published research reports give its campaigns a documentary foundation that state governments have found harder to dismiss than unsubstantiated claims, which is part of why individual states, including Akwa Ibom, have been direct targets of HOMEF-led campaigns for sub-national GMO bans.
Contact
Contact Person: Joyce Brown, HOMEF Director of Programmes
Email: home@homef.org, or editor@homef.org
This Post was submitted by Climate Scorecard Nigeria Country Manager, Michael Johnson.