On the 21st of March, our team in Uganda celebrated the International Day of Forests through tree planting at the Kaazi Forestry reserve. The theme for this year was “Forests and Sustainable Production and Consumption” described by the United Nations as an opportunity to highlight the significant role of forests in the context of climate change.
The event is marked by a reforestation project that was launched in May 2021 by Fairventures Worldwide Uganda to restore the degraded parts of the Kaazi forest with a target to plant over 30,000 seedlings.
At this year’s event, 1,519 trees were planted by more than 200 people – mainly students from Makerere University, environmentalists and tree planting initiatives. Beenie Gunter, a famous Ugandan musician, was also in attendance.
Our Country Director, Patience Naamara, said in her address, “We hope to plant over 30,000 trees at Kaazi forest. It’s a long-term program, and we hope our contribution to this can be a catalyst for further restoration programs for ecosystems that are very important to our well-being as an urban center in Kampala city and also for the general ecosystem”.
Christopher Martin Tumusime, a student from Makerere University department of Forestry explained, “We are planting trees to put back the forest that was here previously because it serves a purpose as a forest in the ecosystem; it is a carbon sink, near the lake and there was once a lot of biodiversity in this place’’.
With fantastic support like that, we can be confident of achieving our goals in Kaazi Forest.