Sowing The Seeds of Environmental Stewardship in Kakamega
Meet Silvi, The Movement Empowering Local Conservationists to Rehabilitate Kakamega Forest
Driving from Kisumu to Western Kenya was quite surreal for Mr. Djimo Serodio. He was visiting Kakamega Forest for the first time.
“It was quite emotional to arrive in the forest and be greeted by the group of farmers I had worked with from afar, ” said Mr. Serodio.
Mr. Serodio is the founder of Silvi, whose mission is to help people plant trees.
Launched in 2022, Silvi empowers reforestation heroes with the knowledge, tools, and funding they need to amplify the impact of their work in their communities.
“We are helping build data standards and guidelines for reforestation. Being African myself, I wanted to focus first on an African forest,” said Mr. Serodio.
He is a Mozambican of Portuguese descent. His love for trees sprung up at a tender age as a child growing up in Mozambique.
“I loved the outdoors. I enjoyed going to the Kruger National Park to see the animals. I also had a green thumb and enjoyed germinating trees. I planted two trees when I was four. The trees are gigantic today. One of them is a mango tree,” said Mr. Serodio.
Silvi is a female given name that means “forest” in Latin. Mr. Serodio said he chose the name to pay tribute to the feminine energy attributed to mother nature.
Silvi's Conservation Leaders in Kakamega Forest
One of the local farmers that Mr. Serodio was eager to meet was Mr. Ernest Shikanga, a tour guide and conservationist at Kakamega Forest. He is from Kakamega East.
In 2014, he formed the Swift Advocacy for Viable Environment (SAVE), a youth group whose mission is to teach environmental education.
“I recruited like-minded youth, and we have been going around schools to teach young people about the significance of Kakamega Forest,” said Mr. Shikanga.
Mr. Shikanga has been the Environmental Education and Research Manager for the Kakamega Forest Community Forest Association (CFA) since 2021.
“We had just finished our first CFA Management Committee meeting when Mr. Serodio arrived at the forest. I was so impressed by Silvi’s technology that I introduced my group to him and requested to partner with him,” said Mr. Shikanga.
As part of the partnership, Mr. Shikanga’s team of 21 volunteers received 12,000 tree seedlings from Silvi. They then identified a plot at one of their member’s homesteads where they established a nursery. They added 16,000 more seedlings, which were ready for transplanting by the time I interviewed him in February.
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He was also impressed by Silvi’s involvement of children in reforestation efforts. The organization has engaged 12 schools in Kakamega in its conservation work. Mr. Serodio hopes to collaborate with other partners to design a conservation curriculum.
“To invest in children is to invest in the future as well as an opportunity to change the current trajectory. Investing into the next generation is always the strongest lever of change,” said Mr. Serodio.
While Mr. Shikanga leads his team of volunteers outside the forest, Mrs. Melvin Munyasa leads another team working within the forest. She, too, is a member of the Kakamega Forest CFA.
"Kakamega Forest is very important to me," said Mrs. Munyasa. "I joined the CFA in 2011 as an office assistant. Then they trained me as an accounts Clerk."
As an active member of the CFA, Mrs. Munyasa was already a conservationist. But now that she had a job, she wanted to do more to protect the woodland that had changed her life.
In 2021, she established a tree nursery. Like other members of the CFA, she began planting seedlings, which she would sell to the forest management and the neighboring community. A year later, Mr. Serodio introduced Silvi to the forest, and she jumped on the bandwagon.
"I lead a team of 6," said Mrs. Munyasa. "At first, we all planted over 20,000 different species of seedlings. Later, each member selected a species of which they planted 2,000 seedlings each. As the group leader, I planted 6,000 seedlings - drawn from all the five species planted by the other members. In total, we have an inventory of over 36,000 seedlings. They are ready for transplanting."
Silvi's Approach to Quantify Impact
Mr. Serodio leads a movement of informed tree planters who rely on carefully designed species and location-specific tree protocols. This allows farmers to match the right tree species with ecosystem services that support local biodiversity, such as resilience to climate change.
"What's impressive about Silvi is the exposure that we get as farmers," said Mrs. Munyasa. "Once we have established a seed bed, we take a picture of the seedlings and feed it in the Silvi app along with information about the seedlings."
That information includes the farmer's name, the tree species planted, the number of seedlings, and their age. Drone technology then captures the precise location of the seedling bed.
This means that once a farmer registers a tree in the Silvi app, anyone worldwide can locate it and keep up with it throughout its lifetime. For this reason, farmers can verify the trees under their stewardship. This allows Silvi to quantify the impact of each tree steward's work and to incentivize them through milestone-based payouts throughout the tree's lifecycle.
"Silvi can help you prove to the world that your trees are planted. It also helps coordinate tree stewardship. And in some cases, we will even pay you to plant the trees!" said Mr. Serodio.
How Impact Fashion Can Help
It did not take long before Silvi’s reforestation efforts caught the eye of Mr. Zede’Kiah Loky Okutoyi, CEO of Blkburd Genes, a leading apparel brand. Mr. Loky is a Kenyan based in the US. Inspired by Mr. Serodio’s work in Kakamega, he, too, wanted to make a difference. The two announced their partnership in July 2023.
As part of their collaboration, Blkburd Genes will release various apparel collections, the proceeds of which will fund Silvi’s reforestation efforts in Kakamega Forest.
The limited-edition line of apparel will be available for purchase on the Blkburd Genes website. Each shirt will include a NFC tag that can be scanned to track the tree that was planted with the proceeds from the sale. The QR code will also provide information about the tree, such as its species, location, growth measurements, and steward history.
Saving East Africa's Last Equatorial Rainforest
It is highly significant to have Mr. Serodio extend the impact of his work in Kakamega Forest. One thing drew him to the over 14,800-hectare forest—its unique status as the last remaining equatorial rainforest in all of East Africa.
The woodland is home to gigantic towering trees, some as old as 100 years. The trees have dark green foliage that offers a dense, light-filtering canopy of tangled branches, lianas, and vines.
There is dwarfish underbrush. On much of the forest floor, a layer of organic matter made up of decomposing old fallen trees, twigs, and leaves covers the ground.
The forest is damp and dense, a haven for endangered and rare animals and birds.
“We inherit over 1000 species of plants, which includes 380 species of trees and over 27 species of snakes, 7 species of primates, and 400 species of birds and other mammals,” said Mr. Shikanga.
Kakamega Forest is arguably the best destination for butterfly and birdwatching. Although he was not visiting the forest for recreational purposes, Mr. Serodio was quickly fascinated by the environment where he landed.
“One of the special moments in the forest was to hear that what I initially thought was a drone flying around was, instead, the Black and White Casqued Hornbill. It was such a special sound. It was also magical to witness the Colobus monkeys,” said Mr. Serodio.
Mrs. Munyasa said the forest is a treasure for the local community that must be protected.
"We graze our animals here. For centuries, our people have been getting their firewood, medicinal herbs, honey, and other unique foods, such as ear mushrooms, from the forest," said Mrs. Munyasa.
About 42 streams originate from the forest, but the water tower remains fragile. When gold was discovered in the 1920s, it was quickly thrown into a path of destruction.
Mining deepened commercial tree harvesting and encroachment that had already taken root in the forest. Luckily, the illegal practices were outlawed in the 1980s.
A 100-meter belt of tea, dubbed Nyayo Tea Zone, was established around the forest to prevent the neighboring community from invading the woodland.
The government and conservation groups have been racing to restore the forest ever since. However, the challenges have not gone away. Areas not covered by the tea zone are particularly targeted. For this reason, the authorities and conservation groups have been erecting a physical fence around the forest.
“I think Kakamega Forest symbolizes other forests around the world where agriculture and native forests collide,” said Mr. Serodio. "I see trees as the fabric of life on land. Our elders, who have been here well before us and can outlive us. And yet, we can so easily cut them down and bring down with them a plethora of other living systems."
Kakamega Forest is not only threatened by human activity but also by invasive species. Vast sways of the forest are degraded. These areas are predominantly covered in thin guava trees, thorny bushes, and other invasive species.
"We risk losing the forest forever, along with all the species that call it home. So we need to repopulate the indigenous tree species that host its biodiversity," said Mr. Serodio.
Carbon Sequestration and Crypto Economics
"One of my biggest worries about our climate is that it is a bit decoupled from nature," said Mr. Serodio.
Although he is also worried about anthropogenic ecosystem collapse, Mr. Serodio is equally motivated by the fact that trees can save our planet. They sequester carbon, which is the main cause of global warming and climate change.
According to some estimates, it would take 1 trillion trees to sequester almost half of the surplus carbon in the atmosphere by 2050. To reach that target, Mr. Serodio said we should plant 38 billion trees annually. But that's a tall order given that the world loses 15 billion trees annually, yet only two billion are recovered in the same period.
"There is a large movement to become carbon neutral. But what excites me more are biodiversity credits because restoring forests not only sequesters carbon but also reverses the trend of habitat loss," said Mr. Serodio.
He believes we can protect the environment by pegging the financial industry to nature and not to profit-driven externality. He sees trees as natural capital that should be reflected on balance sheets if we're to save the planet.
"There is more gold in the universe than trees," said Mr. Serodio. "Yet, we value gold from the perspective of scarcity and utility. But Gold doesn't produce ecosystem services. Trees do. We need to back up money with natural capital, not gold."