When it comes to learning how to nurture seedlings to grow into trees, improving your surroundings and restoring the land around you, you’re never too young to make a start. That’s the thinking behind a project in Tanzania, supported by FAO and its partners, setting up more than 30 clubs in primary and secondary schools to impart these skills to children from an early age.

The students have already started to transform the dry, dusty and windswept degraded lands around their schools into greener, shadier and more pleasant places to be. In the long run, they hope to be able to harvest fruit from the trees and prune the branches for firewood.

As well as engaging in practical work to change their surroundings, the children, aged eight to 16, are also learning about landscape management, techniques for mitigating climate change, using mulch to save water and, for the older kids, linking up with parents to learn how to use biogas instead of firewood. The aim is for new generations to grow up with a practical knowledge of how to restore and conserve forests and confront a growing climate crisis.

The programme, in the northern Arusha and southern Njombe regions, is run by local farmers’ organisations and supported by the Forest and Farm Facility (FFF), a partnership between FAO, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the farming organisations’ alliance, AgriCord.