The women’s nursery doubled its output

The Kanam women's cooperative raised 240,000 seedlings this year, double last year's figure, and now supplies three of our Kenyan sites. The doubling did not come from working twice as hard. It came from removing the two things that had been holding them back.

The bottleneck was never skill. The women of the cooperative knew how to grow trees long before we arrived. What they lacked was space to grow at scale and a buyer they could count on, and without a guaranteed buyer there was no sense in building more shade houses to fill with seedlings nobody had promised to take.

So we gave them a multi-year contract. Knowing we would buy a set number of seedlings each year for several years, they could plan, borrow against the contract and invest. They expanded from one shade house to four.

The wages now go to 22 women who have an income that does not rise and fall with the rains. In a place where most cash work is seasonal and tied to the weather, a steady monthly wage from nursery work changes what a household can plan for, from school fees to fixing a roof.

Their seedlings are some of the healthiest we plant anywhere. Part of that is the care, and part of it is how the contract is written. They are paid largely on seedlings that survive in the ground, not pots filled, so there is no incentive to push out weak stock to hit a count.

Those same seedlings are the ones the solar pumps kept alive through this year's failed short rains. The cooperative grows the trees and then has every reason to see them through, which is the loop we are always trying to close.