I am Mark Odhiambo from Rusinga Island. I am a person who loves trees and very passionate about environmental conservation activities. We are using Waware tree nursery irrespective of the challenges to lead to protect, conserve and restore our environment which is being threatened by so many unhealthy environmental activities like illegal logging and charcoal production. We are determined to be a stable source of seedlings for the community so that getting seedlings to plant does not become a problem.
Our Vision for 2023: Next year we project to do more campaign in beaches, churches, schools and other social places to continue appealing to the community to learn to be friendly to our environment using our famous slogan of “PLANT TREES IMPROVE LIFE” and its translation “PANDA MITI BORESHA MAISHA”. We further encourage and request everyone to join us in this viable course to enable us realize our objective of increasing the forest cover in this island.
I wish you Merry Christmas and happy New Year.
The Waware tree nursery is located at Wakiaga youth polytechnic about three kilometers from Mbita town. It has the capacity of 9,000 seedlings and is managed by a group of some youths and women from that locality on voluntary basis and supervised by KWEPU. Waware tree nursery currently has 2,000 seedlings ready to transplant.
Rusinga Youth Greening Movement was initiated to spearhead the campaign across the island on the positive environmental behavior change. We managed to campaign through out the island successfully in the year 2021 up to early 2022 by doing door to door campains, visiting public gathering like churches, beaches.
Currently, we have 10 youths who are actively involved in the management of both the movement and the tree nursery. The ten volunteers still do the campaign for positive environmental mind set change and assist in tree planting events organized in schools, churches and other places on the island.
The youths also educate the community on the danger of cutting down trees without a replacement, the type of trees to plant and how to manage them, the benefits of planting different trees starting from fruit trees, shade trees among others and proper disposal of wastes. This indeed is along journey and we request that we continue partnering for better results.