Fruit Trees for Schools is a 10-school tree-growing project by the Green Generation Initiative (GGI) funded by the Eleven Eleven Foundation through the Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF). The project, which began in May 2023, aims to address environmental degradation and climate change with the key objective of raising socially and environmentally conscious generations while building capacity to enhance community climate resilience.
As of April 2024, 3750 trees out of the 5,000-target set had been planted in 10 schools with a 72.99% survival rate. GGI was able to successfully register as a Foundation and KCDF supported them in developing a financial management system, procurement, and M&E processes. As a result, GGI has strengthened its finance and logistics operations with enhanced Monitoring and Evaluation of the organization including any other project that may be undertaken beyond this.
GGI collaborated with 10 schools across Nairobi (4) and Nyeri (6) counties, undertaking the planting of 3750 trees within their premises. This is a 75% achievement of the set target. The tree planting activities were affected by the school schedules that kept changing. This initiative encompassed 1,539 indigenous trees and 2,170 fruit-bearing trees.
This is also in readiness to continue spearheading the 15 billion trees by 2032 initiative which is a National Presidential directive in Kenya. With access to more support and resources, GGI now can scale this project to more schools and all 47 counties in Kenya.
Through this project, GGI has built strong support from both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Climate Change in Kenya, with Elizabeth Wathuti, the Founder and Executive director, being identified as a champion of greening projects in schools across Kenya. Furthermore, GGI has mobilized local corporates like Clean Shelf supermarket to incentivize tree planting events. This demonstrates the capacity to mobilize local resources and presents an opportunity to scale this project to more schools and all 47 counties in Kenya.