Hey there! Find below an update by Trees for the Future about their second quarter 2020.

Because of Covid-19 Trees for the future is closely monitoring the pandemic and continuing to keep the safety of Forest Garden farmers, their staff, their partners, and their community top of mind as they take any and all action necessary. Therefore, the organization currently relies on mobile tech for constant field updates and communication.

This is also why Q2 was unlike any quarter they have seen before: in order to protect farmers, their teams, and ensure operations they had to act fast, innovate, listen, and find new ways of communicating. However, they are proud to say that by remaining diligent and providing consistent messaging and reassurance they have achieved what felt impossible when the pandemic began:

  • Farmers well into their program have had access to food in their own backyards during the pandemic. Farmer Dan O. from Homabay, Kenya said, “I can comfortably stay safe home, my forest garden is my supermarket!”
  • Farmers outplanted 720,000 trees from their nurseries during the lockdown across our programs in East Africa. 
  • Farmers have begun outplanting over 1 million trees in Cameroon
  • To ensure nursery development and continued Forest Garden activities during COVID- Lockdowns, 16 training videos were created and sent to lead farmers via WhatsApp. Thanks to this initiative, farmers have prepared nurseries for over 5 million trees in Senegal and for over 2 million trees in Uganda.
  • 4.5 million biodegradable tree sacks were distributed to our Tanzania projects.
  • We remotely connected farmers to local buyers; ensuring the sales of thousands of pounds of produce which contributes to local food security and farmer incomes.

The organization was also able to achieve some internal changes to stay as efficient as possible.

  • They cut their programs budget by 20% while still on track to implement Forest Gardens with over 17,000 farmers and plant 30 million of the planned 35 million trees for 2020. 
  • They are safely and cautiously reopening in-person activities in each country-based.
  • Their Executive Director and Training Team conducted a 7 week virtual Forest Garden Certification Challenge in which 112 people from 36 countries completed the course and signed up to take the exam. This will help reach more farming communities around the globe!

This was a very successful past quarter of Trees for the Future, which was supported by you. We hope that the organization will be able to achieve its goals for the next quarter. Therefore, we will give our best to enable you to participate in their sustainability projects. If you want to learn more about Trees for the Future you can visit their website here and if you would like to sign up to their newsletter to be always up to date click here.