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Olchani means tree in the Maa language. It began with one nursery in Amboseli in 2021 and has become a way of life: communities growing indigenous trees, and earning a dignified living doing it.
02About this project
Olchani is the Maa word for tree, and the project does what its name says. It grows indigenous trees across the Amboseli ecosystem, and the people who do the work are paid for it, own it and keep it going.
It started in May 2021 with a location and a promise. Dr Winnie Kiiru offered her place in the Amboseli area to host the first tree nursery, and Jim Nyamu agreed to help care for the seedlings. Four trees went into the ground to inaugurate it, and the invitation was open to anyone who wanted to help reforest the ecosystem, for the elephants and giraffe that live in it and for the clean air of the people who live there too.
From that beginning the work became communal. Nurseries were established with youth at the Kenya Wildlife Service’s Amboseli headquarters and at Oldoinyo Oibor Primary School, and then in the communities themselves. The first was the Osoit nursery, Intomonok Osoit, built for ten thousand seedlings, and the Ildepen and Tembo nurseries followed. Local women, the mamas, raise the seedlings and earn a real income for it. Decisions are made in barazas, the community meetings where everyone with a stake in the land has a voice.
The seedlings are planted out into restoration sites, chief among them the Orregie Enclosure inside Amboseli National Park. It is planned as a small forest of five to seven thousand indigenous trees, and it helps hold a wildlife corridor open. On National Tree Planting Day the community put four hundred seedlings into the ground there in a single day. Beyond the restoration sites, the project carries tree-growing into households, churches and schools, putting seedlings directly into families’ hands.
The partnership with ifaw has grown alongside it; when ifaw marked twenty-five years of conservation work in East Africa, its team planted trees raised in these community nurseries. And the thinking has extended beyond trees: Olchani’s second phase added grass and fodder, and became Ubuntu Hay, the community hay bank at Lemongo.
In the foundation’s own words, restoration is more than planting trees. It is mamas leading community nurseries and earning dignified incomes, youth growing trees while growing their purpose, and communities healing land while healing livelihoods.