The national strategy for achieving and maintaining over 30 per cent tree cover by 2032 is yet to be implemented through the Special Presidential Forestry and Rangeland Restoration Program popularly referred to as .
This is despite the strategy being adopted and approved by Cabinet in December 2022 with the Treasury releasing money to implement it.
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The project also faces a setback over the failure to recruit a substantive senior staff in the state department to spearhead the strategy, also known as Forest Conservation Secretary (FCS), a position unfilled for almost a decade.
The FCS is directly answerable to the Principal Secretary (PS) and coordinates all the agencies under the Ministry on behalf of the PS. He also liaises with other ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) on matters forestry countrywide, a high-ranking official disclosed.
The strategy, the source says, has never undergone public participation for the public to understand and own it.
To effectively coordinate the implementation, monitoring and reporting, several governance structures were to be established. This includes a national coordination committee, a multi-institutional technical committee, a county implantation coordinating committee and a sub-county level coordination committee.
This is yet to happen and means that the strategy lacks the governors structures which on conception were designed to drive its implementation from the national to the grassroots, sub-county level Whole-government Whole-society approach.
Secondly, in the strategy document adopted and approved by the Cabinet, it was stipulated that there shall be a secretariat domiciled at the Environment Ministry.
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As per the approved strategy, the secretariat was to constitute a multi-institutional team with representatives from relevant government agencies, the Council of Governors, NGOs, the private sector and development partners representatives.
These were to be put in place instead of an amorphous secretariat (comprising of non-foresters such as human resource personnel, agriculturist economists, politicians, and administrators) that was created to run the show without the professional input of the technical officers in the state department of Forestry, the senior official noted.
The National Tree Planting Committee has never met to deliberate on the national tree planting programme, the official said.
But Charity Munyasia, the senior deputy chief conservator of forests at Kenya Forest Service (KFS), said that she is convinced that Kenya is going to plant 15 billion trees even before ten years elapse as long as resources are made available.
