Grow Trees and Offset Carbon with African Farmers

1. Is our work officially divided into several small projects (each running for a specific time period) or is our tree planting counted as on-going work (without time limits or a defined project scope)

The tree planting project of the High Atlas Foundation has timelines, specific scopes, and benchmarks that directly correspond to the number of trees planted and their monitoring in addition to project and budgetary reporting as well as fulfilling procedures related to securing the necessary certifications in order to produce, transport, and transplant trees in all jurisdictions of Morocco.

2. How many trees have we planted in the last 3 years? (When were those projects registered)

In the past three years, HAF planted 1,045,000 trees in 39 provinces in Morocco with approximately 9,000 farming families, including 11 varieties of fruit-bearing trees and approximately 1,680 hectares of land. HAF's project in partnership with Ecosia, the German social enterprise, began on April 6, 2017.

3. How is our financial system set up? Is our main cost nurseries and employees?

Our main costs are those associated with first establishing nurseries, particularly water infrastructure like wells, solar water pump systems, wells, towers, piping, and the staff to maintain the nurseries. The other major cost is that of monitoring the trees that we plant with farming communities with farming households. This is a significant human resource, including the cost of travel and accommodations.

HAF utilizes a Quickbooks system, generating monthly financial statements that are reconciled and provided to the finance committee of HAF's Board of Directors. HAF is also annually audited by a third party by Price WaterhouseCoopers. Audit reports are available upon request.

4. Can we prove to have an ongoing financial need/gap to finance our projects?

Yes, we can. HAF has been granted land lent in-kind in order to build an additional 12 community-managed nurseries. These nurseries could generate a combined approximately 4 million trees annually. HAF is currently without funding in order to implement these new and important nurseries in different biozones of the country. These nurseries would be in addition to the 13 nurseries that HAF currently manages with communities on land lent in-kind by public agencies, including the Department of Water and Forests, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Youth and Sports, as well as University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Fez. Lenders of land also include cooperatives, associations, and the Moroccan Jewish community. The potential nurseries that can be built with new financial partners are critical for farming communities to transition toward the far more financially sustainable and beneficial organic fruit trees.

5. Can we provide a map with our project locations (how many trees per location)?

Yes, this map is a sample of trees monitored in the past nine months: With the current planting season recently concluded, we are now heavily focused on monitoring the nearly 780,000 trees that have been planted in 2020-2021.

6. Would we be open to certification of our projects in combination with those of other Moroccan organizations? (This would lower the cost of certification for us)

Yes, we are open to working with partners in order to gain certification at a reduced cost. We have already had recent discussions with the director of the National Institute for Agriculture Research, an agency that HAF is now developing a partnership agreement with in order to assist with soil samples and mapping that help fulfill certification and monitoring requirements.