Deforestation in Kenya's drylands is not driven by malice. It is driven by arithmetic. A standing tree earns a family nothing this month; charcoal does. Any restoration model that ignores this arithmetic is asking the poorest households in the country to subsidise a global public good. And it will lose that argument every time the school fees fall due.
TreePassport's answer is to put the tree on the right side of the household ledger. We pay smallholder growers directly: a planting wage of USD 1.50 for every verified seedling they put in the ground, and USD 0.50 for each subsequent verified growth check-in. Payments are tied to QR-scanned, GPS-anchored evidence, and disbursed via M-PESA: money that arrives on the same phone that did the scanning.
Small numbers, real budgets
To readers in Nairobi or abroad, $1.50 may sound symbolic. In the planting communities we serve, it is not. A grower who plants and maintains a few hundred trees across a season earns a meaningful supplementary income, one that field interviews consistently show flowing to three destinations first: school costs, clinic visits, and dry-season food.
Just as important is the cadence. Because growth check-ins continue for the life of the tree, the income is recurring rather than once-off. A family's woodlot becomes an asset that pays small dividends for care, rather than a stockpile that pays once for cutting. Several of our most active growers describe their tagged trees, only half-jokingly, as employees.
The ripple, audited
Because every shilling we disburse is tied to a verifiable scan, the economics of the program are as auditable as its ecology. Donors can see not only that trees are alive, but that the payment for keeping them alive reached the specific person who did the work: no intermediaries, no allowances evaporating between the county office and the field.
The wider effects compound quietly. Young people who left for casual town work return to manage family plots. Neighbours who watched one household earn from its trees register for the next planting season. Nursery micro-enterprises spring up to meet seedling demand. None of this required a slogan about valuing nature; it required nature to pay on time.
Restoration economics, done honestly, is livelihoods economics. The forest that survives is the one someone is paid to watch.