On November 13, 2023, the Kenyan government declared a holiday in order to mobilize the population to plant 100 million trees. This initiative is part of an ambitious plan to combat climate change that seeks to plant 15 billion trees in the next decade. This holiday represents the cornerstone of this strategy, urging every citizen or resident to plant two trees to reach the goal of 100 million.
Planting trees is the goal
Trees absorb carbon dioxide and return oxygen to the atmosphere. This initiative is totally opposed to the indiscriminate logging of the Amazon that has no brakes.
Kenya’s Environment Minister trusted the response to the proposal from its citizens. To do this, she made 150 million seedlings available to the population in public nurseries that were given free of charge.
The project consisted of planting the saplings in the previously designated areas. However, the same government encouraged citizens to buy at least two more seedlings to plant on their own land.
William Ruto, president of Kenya, led the proposal in the east of the country, more precisely in Makueni. Part of his cabinet of ministers moved to other places to lead the process, along with local governors and other government authorities.
Control of the operation is done digitally
They will monitor the trees already planted through an Internet application they named Jaza Miti. In this way they monitored the planting carried out by organizations or individuals. They also created a detailed record of the number of plants, species and the date they were planted. The same application provides information about the planting process and verifies which species to plant in each type of land, according to the Ministry of the Environment.
The head of that ministry declared a day before the holiday that the call had been a success. By Sunday night, November 12, more than 2 million people had already registered on the application. However, there were doubts about whether people living in cities would join the call.
Many will choose to enjoy a day of rest without leaving their home. According to Teresa Muthoni, a Kenyan environmentalist, although the proposal was excellent, it did not have sufficient dissemination in the graphic and digital media, highlighting the necessity of the task to be carried out.
The poor economy of Kenyans forces them to work, even on holidays, to bring food to their homes. Another of the cons that the environmentalist found in this proposal is that many of the seedlings are exotic species. “It is necessary to plant native trees in the right place,” she concluded.
One of the complaints of Kenyans is that the government cares about tree planting, but totally neglects the illegal felling of entire forests. In any case, the initiative is optimal to take into account and apply in other parts of the world.
