African Forest
African Forest is a social responsibility entreprise created in 2000, headquartered at Soysambu Estate on top of a hill overlooking Lake Elementeita. The founders, Helen Thornton and Samuel Kenya Mutiso, are developing a large tree nursery trying to preserve endemic forest species. Trees are grown from seeds collected by scouts from remaining forest fragments still persisting in small pockets of closed canopy forests located on steep ridges and narrow gorges around the basins of Lake Naivasha and Lake Elementeita.
Once taken to the Soysambu base, seeds are treated, preserved and stored, before being planted on site. The nursery counts more than 100 endemic species, mostly trees but also herbs.
The entreprise produces and commercialises a number of non-timber products including nutritional food integrators, medicines and cosmetics. All these products employ leaves, fruits and seeds taken from the herbs, bushes and trees grown within the nursery.
Several other experimental projects run on this unusual forest-farm: an earthen kiln designed to enhance the efficiency of making charcoal is producing several bags of sustainable charcoal per week by using dead wood as well as wood cut during the thinning out of endemic tree plantations.
Earthworms are grown on site to prepare high quality compost from kitchen remains and from dead leaves. "Earthworm juice" is collected from their secretions; this turned out to be an efficient totally biodegradable pesticide able to protect young nursery trees from insect pests.
More information and contacts for African Forest are available on their official website.
