What county chapters taught us about restoration economics

Three years ago we began rotating restoration-economics workshops through the county chapters — Nakuru, Kakamega, Machakos, and now forty-one more. The syllabus was ours. The lessons, increasingly, are not.

The first finding is stubborn: labour, not seedlings, is the binding constraint. Counties can source millions of seedlings; they cannot source the disciplined, paid, multi-season labour that keeps a seedling alive through its first two dry seasons. Where restoration has worked, it has been organised as employment — and paid as such.

The second is budgetary misalignment: county funds are appropriated in July, when planting windows in many zones are already closing, and lapse in June, when aftercare is peaking. Fixing restoration economics in Kenya is less about new money than about new calendars.

The chapters’ own proposal — which we are adopting — is to fund nursery enterprises rather than tree counts: standing local institutions that aggregate labour, seed and knowledge, and survive budget cycles. It is the community-aggregation model, arriving from an unexpected direction.