By Isaiah Esipisu
MASENO, Kenya, Jan 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Armed with a solar-powered water pump for irrigation and a quarter-acre piece of borrowed land, widow Hakima Mohammed has become a Western Kenya tree tycoon.
Since 2013, she has sold at least 1.5 million seedling trees, mainly to local small-scale farmers, who are planting them as a way to boost their incomes from wood and fruit sales, particularly in the face of recurring droughts that have shriveled crops.
In the process, the 57-year-old has found a way to support herself and her family – and Kenya is getting a hand in its efforts to see at least 10 percent of the country’s land covered in trees by 2030, as part of efforts to rein in drought and meet climate change goals.
“This is a very good example of entrepreneurship which I would really encourage young men and women to take up, and do the same in other parts of the country,” said Eston Mutitu, a senior research scientist at the Kenya Forest Research Institute.
Mohammed, who lives in Mwiyekhe, a village near Western Kenya’s Maseno township, started her tree nursery in 2013, soon after her husband’s death following a short illness.
Officials at the forest institute, where she has been working for nearly 30 years in a low-level position, arranged for her to borrow a plot of land for the sapling nursery, a project she and her husband had talked about trying before his death.
With little experience beyond having watered tree nursery beds at the institute, Mohammed went to work planting an initial 20,000 seedling trees, hiring local young men to help her carry water from a nearby stream to irrigate the young plants.
That hard work became easier starting in 2016, when she acquired a solar-powered water pump from Futurepump, a company in Kenya that makes pumps available on credit. The bit of technological help has let her dramatically step up the number of seedlings she can raise and sell.
“This helped me increase productivity and now I have at least 250,000 tree seedlings on my nursery at any given time all round the year, given that I no longer rely on rainfall or manual fetching of the water to sprinkle on the crops,” said the mother of three, who was not educated beyond primary school level.
