50000 trees/year for a self-reliant rural Senegal

Friends,

With heartfelt gratitude from the CREATE! team, I would like to report that with your support, our reforestation campaign in rural Senegal is scheduled to finish successfully. Our efforts to plant 30,000 trees in 2021 to fight deforestation and to provide the community members with food, shade and fuel is nearly complete with nearly 20000 trees already planted around our partner communities. We just need a final push for completion and hope to achieve that in the coming months with your continued generosity.

As mentioned previously, this project takes place mainly during the rainy season in Senegal spanning the months of July-September. During this time, all of CREATE!s partner communities start to plant tree saplings within their cooperative gardens with the aim of not just improving the tree cover in Senegal, but to also improve soil conditions, regulate temperatures and offset more than 1,038,000 pounds of Carbon every year. The communities get ready for this event by planting seeds and nurturing the saplings in prepared sachets months before the actual reforestation efforts begin. The advent of the rainy season is then celebrated not just in our partner communities but all over the country with the Journée de l’arbre (Tree Day), a day to plant trees all around the country. Our communities of course do not restrict the tree planting to just that one day but continue to do so over the next few months. The rainy season is chosen as the best period for planting because each sapling does not have to be manually watered in the initial stage when watering to establish deep roots in essential; the rains take care of the watering requirements! This also means trees can be planted all around the community, even in regions that do not have a steady access to perennial water like our cooperative gardens do.

This year, with the seeds provided them, the communities have planted fruit and nut trees including papayas, guavas, jujube, cashews and trees like Gliricidia, Albizzia lebbeck, Peltophorum and Cassia for shade and fuel. The trees they plant are surprisingly fast-growing and resilient in Senegal’s desert climate. For example, papaya trees grow 6-10 inches in their first year alone and are ready to harvest just 6-9 months after planting. Each tree can bear up to 150 fruits per year. Over the years, the trees mature and produce nuts and fruits that communities harvest for food and to sell or provide firewood which families use as fuel.

Once trees were planted around the community garden, our technicians started distributing trees to different regions within the community, including schools, homes and mosques. This activity is still going on with 13,744 trees distributed already. In order to do this, our team loads up the saplings that were nurtured in nurseries all around our partner communities in the back of their trucks and delivers it to the various places. They also show the community members the proper way of planting and nurturing those saplings. To fulfill this last part of the project, our team still needs your support.

We want to thank you for your ongoing interest in and support of our programs in Senegal. This project would not have been possible without your thoughtful donation, and with your help, we hope to complete our reforestation efforts for 2021 soon. Please contact me at paulomi@createaction.org with any questions, feedback, or concerns. We really appreciate your donation to help women in rural Senegal fight the effects of desertification and climate change on their life and livelihoods.

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