Temwa helps local schools access fruit trees and promotes tree planting from an early age.
Our tree planting project is encouraging reforestation across Nkhata Bay North, where poverty has fuelled the unsustainable loss of trees. Twenty percent of forest cover has cut down in only twenty years. Global affairs and climate change are compounding this, making it harder for farming communities to sustain themselves from the land. However, with Temwa’s reforestation programme, communities are developing sustainable alternatives for long term prosperity, such as through planting fruit trees.
This means providing support that enables people to find alternative livelihoods, where the forest is valued and protected as a precious resource. Which is why we are encouraging stewardship and tree planting from an early age…
Planting fruit trees with schools and households
Temwa Malawi has therefore supported 20 households and two permaculture clubs at Mzgola and Kawulasisi primary schools to establish fruit orchards in the communities. In total, the two schools were provided with 2,500 assorted fruit seedlings each, including mango, orange, tangerine, guava, pear, loquat and blackberry trees.
Planting the seedling orchards at the schools means they can act as a motherbed for grafting seedlings. This way community members and students can outplant grafted off-shoots in their own homes, once the trees are mature enough.
Why fruit trees?
For many people currently living in the communities where we work, hunger continuously hovers. Planting fruit trees helps provide farmers and communities with an added source of income and nutrition, helping food security and livelihoods. This also forms an important part of our comprehensive reforestation strategy, along planting other types of trees, such as for agro-forestry and land regeneration.
We hope this will bring long term benefits across the community, while fostering a sense of stewardship among young students.
Farming communities in the area are used to planting crops, however this incorporates trees into local agriculture. Now every household involved is eagerly anticipating an orchard of around 100 fruit trees in the next three years!
