There is a version of this work that produces better photographs and worse rivers. We have tried to avoid it, not always successfully.
Through existing structures, not around them
It is faster to run a project as a self-contained NGO operation: your own staff, your own sites, your own reporting. It is also why so many project sites revert within three years of the funding ending.
We work through district environment officers, sub-county officials and existing community groups. This is slower, involves more meetings, and means sharing credit. It also means that when our funding for a district pauses, somebody local still has a reason to care about the site.
At a scale we can actually reach
We work in three of the catchment's ten districts, concentrated where we can reach a site and get home the same day. This is not modesty; it is that a site we cannot revisit is a site we cannot monitor, and unmonitored planting is not restoration.
We would rather be genuinely present in three districts than nominally present in ten.
Principles we actually apply
- Baseline before intervention. No claim of improvement without a record of what was there before.
- Whoever uses the land is party to the agreement, not just whoever owns it.
- Publish survival rates next to planting numbers, always.
- Publish failures. An organisation that only reports successes is not reporting.
- Say plainly what is outside our remit rather than implying we cover it.
- Do not photograph or quote a person without asking them first, in their own language.
Things we have got wrong
We planted eucalyptus near water in our first season. We ran a school programme with our own staff that folded the moment the funding did. We planted a site in 2023 without confirming who farmed it, and lost the lot. All three are on the lessons page in more detail.
Read the failures too
The lessons page is the least flattering thing on this site and probably the most useful.