My Tree, My Fruit, My Wealth awareness campaign at Muhoho Secondary School, Gatundu
Kenya Water Towers Agency work closely with communities, institutions and relevant stakeholders to help effectively achieve its mandate. Community participation and stakeholder involvement has been integrated in the Agency’s projects and activities in order to ensure viability of projects and community ownership of projects. As part of the strategy to achieve its mandate, the agency has adopted a tree planting awareness program in secondary schools through planting of fruit trees.
In line with the organization support towards greening Kenya, through tree planting, KWTA launched an institutional based tree planting exercise at Muhoho High school in Kiambu County on Friday, 23rd November 2018. The agency planted over 100 avocado seedlings at the institution and further donated 900 seedlings to established grower groups and local community.
The exercise at Muhoho High school will be a first of similar fruit tree planting exercises and awareness programs that the agency plans to undertake in secondary schools across the country. The program seeks to address the multipurpose of trees in human, animal, environmental and socio-economic well-being. It seeks to impart conservation culture among students at an early age and provide an opportunity for environmental education in schools.
Fruit trees take shorter time to mature compared to some local indigenous tree species and this will go a long way in the commitment of the Country to achieve the 10% forest cover by the year 2022 which requires planting of at least 360 million trees per year for the next five years, and in order to achieve this, the commitment needs to extend to institutions and individual citizens to plant more trees in their private farms and homes. But in order to entice an ordinary Kenyan into environmental conservation tangible and observable economic benefits of the trees need to be addressed and emphasized and benefit that come along with fruit trees include; source of livelihood through fruit production which is a source of food, nutrition and income, source of timber, fuel, honey production through bee keeping among others.
The trees planted on school premises and farms provide opportunities for environmental education and a practical way of introducing and integrating environmental education in schools by students learning and embracing environmental conservation.