In collaboration with UK charity RIPPLE Africa, Fruitful Office’s fruit tree planting initiative has been a tremendous success, helping to improve nutrition, generate income for the local people and help the environment.
Over the course of the last decade, Fruitful Office planted one tree in Malawi, Africa, for every office fruit basket sold through their website.
The Planting Fruit Trees in Africa campaign focused mainly on guava and papaya fruit trees, as they grow quickly. RIPPLE Africa manages 20 specialist community fruit tree nurseries while working with 10,000 households yearly to grow 10 fruit trees each. The program helps to grow improved citrus, mango, guava, pawpaw (papaya), avocado, and banana trees in the Nkhata Bay District of Malawi.
What is involved?
The fruit trees are grown from infancy, with specialists teaching the locals how to care for them. Fruitful Office provides the seeds and the tubes needed and training to ensure that as many seedlings as possible are planted. Fruit trees are then given to families, schools and other community projects to help the community.
Although some fruit trees grow naturally in Africa, these trees are often not well cared for, suffer from deforestation or can be prone to viruses. RIPPLE Africa and Fruitful Office are working together to provide trees that produce a greater crop yield, are of better quality, and are strong enough to resist viruses.
Aside from helping the environment, the Fruitful Office tree planting campaign also helps improve nutrition. In Malawi, malnutrition is a large cause of child death, as a poor diet without the vitamins and minerals found in fruit leaves many vulnerable to disease.
As a result of this initiative, Malawian families benefit from a source of fruit and firewood. As well as this, the tree planting campaign also helps generate income for families in the area, as the healthy fruit from these trees is highly competitive in the market.
In association with RIPPLE Africa, Fruitful Office was able to plant 105,981 trees in Malawi from July to September. Now, they are focusing on bringing the project further north to the deforested area of Muzuzu.
What’s next on the agenda?
The northern area of Muzuzu is an area devastated by the effects of deforestation. With a population of 200,000, there is a great demand for firewood and building materials with an ever-diminishing supply of trees.
Fruitful Office has been working with the local government forestry staff to grow papaya and guava trees and quick-growing trees like Senna Siamea.
The campaign has a meaningful effect on the area and allows communities to make money and become more successful. As the project continues to grow, Fruitful Office updates its clients every quarter on the success of the campaign, and now many trees have been planted. This allows customers of Fruitful Office to ‘buy in’ and contribute to the corporate responsibility of their fruit basket supplier in a meaningful way. A win-win-win, you could say!