1 million trees in Zambia

One of the things I find amazing about WFP is its ability to link food with many other aspects of life and to address these issues. In 2003, WFP started the school meals programme in Zambia. A great project that has increased the enrollment in schools, stabilized attendance and provided major benefits for the health and future prospects of these children. The programme attributes a great role to the community, which is responsible for the collection of the wood, preparation of meals and the building of the kitchens and storage facilities. Preparing the food for 276,647 children (the number of children that receive a WFP meal at school) every day requires quite a lot of firewood and within a few years, the damaging effects this has had on the forests around the schools is evident. Furthermore, in many poor communities people engage themselves in the production of charcoal, increasing the scale of deforestation in the country. Stimulated by recent discussion on climate change it was time to take action. WFP Zambia has taken action in two ways. First, we have distributed 498 stoves to the Schools on the meals programme. The major advantage of these stoves is that they require only a tenth of the firewood required to prepare a meal compared to the traditional open fires previously used. Secondly, a new fantastic project: the planting of 1 million trees at schools in Zambia. Different types of trees have been distributed: trees that can be used to fence the school; fruit trees; trees that improve the fertility of the soil and therefore can be planted in the school gardens; and trees that grow very fast and can be used for firewood.

 

A challenging project, because planting trees requires very technical knowledge and planting a million trees also requires a lot of land. Therefore WFP is cooperating with both the Ministry of Education (for the coordination of the project) and the Ministry of Forestry (for the technical knowledge). Buying small trees is very expensive and therefore WFP has bought seeds for the schools. The planting of seeds requires extra care and attention in order to gain good germination and therefore needs a lot of energy from all the implementing partners, the communities, the teachers and the pupils. Furthermore, most schools received 4 seeds per pupils and therefore the number of trees per school can go up to over 1,000. This requires a lot of land. As most schools are not in possession of their own land, they have to get this land from their traditional leaders.

 

Last week I was fortunate enough to visit 13 schools in 5 different projects to evaluate the start of the tree planting. And I think it is going great! The enthusiasm of these schools was overwhelming. I imagined there were going to be difficulties as we have to convince people to invest a lot in a project whose results will be realized after 5 years. But I have not met one person who doubted the usefulness of this project and almost all the schools had started to plant the seeds. Some schools have built impressive nurseries for the seeds, where others had cleared a great piece of land for the direct planting of the trees. The community helped planting the seeds and the pupils water the seeds at least three times a week. Of course this project also has its challenges. The major challenge is the serious lack of rainfall in some districts that I visited. The idea was to plant the trees now, because the rain would water the trees and this would decrease the burden on the schools. However, as far as I have seen, the schools are more than willing and capable to tack up these challenges and I am already planning to go back to Zambia in 5 years time to see 1 million trees providing shade, fruits and firewood to the school children in Zambia.