Naidoo's activism went from neighbourhood organising and community youth work to civil disobedience with mass mobilisations against the white controlled apartheid government.

[6] In the book Naidoo recounts the day of his mother's suicide when he was just 15 and how it became a catalyst for his journey into radical action against the Nationalist Party's apartheid regime.

[7] Naidoo served as the Launch Executive Director of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace & Dignity (2016)[8] and he was appointed as the Inaugural Global Ambassador in June 2020.

[12] Born in Durban, South Africa, Kumi Naidoo became involved in anti-apartheid activities, resulting in his expulsion from high school.

After Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990, Naidoo returned to South Africa to work on the legalisation of the African National Congress and to lead the adult literacy campaigns and voter education efforts.

In August 2012, Naidoo along with a group of Greenpeace volunteers occupied Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya oil platform in the Pechora Sea for 15 hours, for the second time in the Arctic.

In 2014 a leaked document indicated that a staffer had lost £3m in donor money on the foreign exchange market by betting mistakenly on a weak euro while Greenpeace's financial department faced a series of other various problems due to mismanagement.

It was also revealed that Greenpeace International's program director Pascal Husting was regularly commuting by plane between his home in Luxembourg to the organization's offices in Amsterdam.

In order to deal with the budgetary crisis Naidoo announced to staff that the organization's headquarters would cut almost 100 jobs as a part of urgent restructuring.

Naidoo said, "Now more than ever, the organisation needs a secretary general who is fighting fit and can see through its mandate with vitality that this role, this institution, and the mission of universal human rights deserve.".

[37] In May 2016, Naidoo became the Founding Chair of Africans Rising, a Pan-African movement of people and organisations, working for justice, peace and dignity.

The organization play a critical role on the continent pushing governments, business, and even established global and national NGOs to focus on challenges Africans deem critical, including demands for a fair global trading system, concrete action to address the effects of climate change and the creation and strengthening of a representative coalition to protect our natural resources and the environment.

In July 2021, Kumi Naidoo was awarded the prestigious Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow[39] at the Robert Bosch Academy, in Berlin.

Concurrently with the period spent in Berlin at the Robert Bosch Academy, Naidoo hosted a new podcast for the Green Economy Coalition, 'that tackles some of the biggest issues of our time[41].'

Titled Power, People & Planet[42] with Kumi Naidoo, the first series included frank conversations with some of biggest names in modern thinking and science.

His first, titled Boiling Point: Can Citizen Action Save the World?,[46] looked at the urgency of the climate crisis and Naidoo's reflections on how we need to unite as humanity to face this challenge.

His roles as of December 2022[update] include: "It is obvious that too many corporations and governments do not listen and put power and profit over people, ignoring what is in the best interest of humanity.