Kenya gave its citizens a holiday this week to go out and plant trees.
The objective was to get people to plant 100 million trees, as part of the government’s goal of having 15 billion trees planted in a decade, according to the BBC.
Environment Minister Soipan Tuya was quoted as saying the holiday was intended to encourage ‘each and every Kenyan to own the initiative’.
Every citizen was encouraged to plant at least two seedlings. Some 150 million seedlings were being made available by Kenya’s forest agency at public nurseries.
The BBC quotes environmentalist Teresa Muthoni as saying that the initiative was a ‘very good idea’, but that it hadn’t been possible for everybody to take the day off. She said that ‘many people have to continue with their work to put food on the table… it is coming at a time when our economy is not doing well so a lot of people are struggling financially’.
The BBC reports that the Kenyan government has also been criticised for championing tree planting while failing to tame illegal logging in public forests, having recently lifted a ban on logging.
However, Minister Tuya defended the decision, saying only forests designed for commercial purposes were affected, and these amounted to only about 5% of the total.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usaidkenya/6138841311/in/photostream/]