Skotana Msweli sits on a stool outside his one-room home is Waterloo Township near Durban to talk about how he managed to send his last-born child to University by growing indigenous trees. His is the only house on a street of more than twenty low-cost houses that is fenced. What’s more, he has a nursery of thousands of trees in his back yard, along the sides of his house, and pretty much everywhere he can fit them. Skotana is part of the Wildlands Conservation Trust’s Indigenous Trees for Life Programme.
“I was invited to join [the programme] in 2006 and Wildlands explained how to grow indigenous trees and how they would buy them back from us afterwards”, he said. The Indigenous Trees for Life programme aims to help members of township and rural communities in South Africa to grow a future for themselves.
“I have seven children, and I support the family working as a security officer. I am a temporary worker so there is not enough money to pay for university education but Wildlands has come to my rescue”, he said. Skotana has grown more than R10 000 worth of trees and asked that instead of the normal goods available for trading (food, clothes, bikes etc) that Wildlands pay for his youngest daughter to go to university.
And so he used around 2000 of his trees to fund his daughter Angel’s registration fees for a BComm Accounting degree and accommodation for the year at the University of Zululand. Angel is 17 years old and dreams of working in a big financial firm as an accountant.
Thanks to her fathers’ hard work and determination to better their life, she is one step closer to achieving this dream and being able to support her family. “I wish to say thank-you [to my father] for what he has done for me… I promise that in my studies I will do well until I graduate,” said Angel.
There are another 2500 hard working ‘tree-preneurs’ like Mr Skotana spread across 23 communities in South Africa, who grow around 400 000 trees a year. The trees are then either planted back into these communities or planted out in forest restoration projects.
