One of the female workers at the Kiambere plantation, here in the inner sanctum of the nursery. Underneath the plastic sheets are teeny tiny mukau seedlings, which this nursery can produce 1 200 000 every year. That’s a heck of a lot of trees, and yet, it’s a far cry from what the company aims at. The vision of Better Globe Forestry is to eradicate poverty and corruption in Africa, and this will be accomplished through the mission, which reads: Through “social entrepreneurship” plant as many trees as there are people on the planet and thereby finance a successful implementation of the Vision. To accomplish this the company aim at planting a million trees a day!

This will make a huge difference in many ways, not in the least when it comes to providing job opportunities for people. Kenya has an unemployment -level of somewhere between 10-40% – I have not been able to find any definitive numbers, but it’s definitely a lack of job opportunities. By empowering people (for instance by providing them with a job) they can lift themselves from poverty. The Gapminder Foundation illustrative Dollar Street is a very visual way to see what happens when people do that. What seems to work better than anything else to raise entire families and communities from poverty is to empower women. This is one of the reasons why Better Globe Forestry has a large percentage of women workers.

I’ve just finished reading Melinda Gates’s book The moment of Lift and it’s filled with great examples of just this. In the introductory chapter, she writes: How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings–and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. And how can we create a moment of lift in human hearts so that we all want to lift up women? Because sometimes all that’s needed to lift women up if to stop pulling them down.

Advent Calendar for 2019: sharing pictures and stories/reflections from my trip to Kenya in June. I went to visit “my trees” and get a hands-on experience of the social entrepreneurship of the Kenyan forestry company that I buy trees through.

Full disclosure: I am proud to say I am both a customer and an ambassador for the company. If you are curious to find out more, let me know and I’ll gladly get in touch with you! Here’s my sponsored link: https://betterglobe.com/27216