Trees make the soil more fertile. They also help prevent desertification. Trees give us shade, serve as windbreaks, and provide us with fruits and animals with browse. Trees supply us with wood that we use to build houses, make furniture, build fences, and burn for fuel. Hooray for trees! Look around you. Does your area need more trees? Ask older people in your area to tell you where trees used to grow when they were young. Ask them what happened to the trees and forests. Today, most areas across East Africa certainly need more trees because too many people have cut them down without replanting them. From an average forest cover of over 14%, our region is now suffering with less than 2% left! By planting trees, you’ll be doing something meaningful to improve your area, and the lives of people living there. Hooray for you! Propagating or growing trees from locally gathered seed is best. Our indigenous forests are a result of thousands of years of succession and natural selection. Indigenous trees are best adapted to the climate and soils where they have evolved resistance to disease and fungal attack. An enormous variety of our plant and animal communities has become dependent on these trees too. So planting indigenous trees permits the conservation of a multitude of other living things