Eco-action in Kenya - February 2022 Update

Situated in the highlands of Kenya, in the Kijabe Forest, our Monkey Corner site has planted over 384,800 trees and employs 8 planters from the surrounding villages. Since the start of 2021, CarltonOne’s donations have helped create an average of 187 employment days per month.

This employment can have tremendous benefits to the lives and communities of our team members. Our planters often use this income to provide essential services to their families, such as medicine, improved diets, or educational opportunities.

The Kijabe Forest is a government conservation area in the highlands of Kenya. The site is 321 hectares of steep ravines and flat plains. It used to be covered in a closed canopy forest, but the hills and steep slopes are now completely bare. Over the last few years, landslides have become a significant problem, threatening the communities living below the slopes.

Planting in this area is focused first on stabilizing the soil on the steep slopes through planting indigenous tree seedlings and indigenous bamboo. Then, the seedbanks in the ground will be restored through the use of seedballs. Seedballs are made up of prepared soil parcels and native seeds to plant large areas in timing with local rains.

Our planting teams at the site come from the communities living at the base of the slopes of the escarpment area under direct threat from landslides. We also plan to hire planting teams that live directly above the escarpment, creating communities focused on protecting each other from the degradation and threat created from past deforestation. 

This project is thriving. We’ll be planting many more trees next season. Our site has the capacity for up to 895,000 trees, spaced out at a density of 2,500 trees per hectare.