Ethiopian woman's tree-planting persistence transforms community skepticism into environmental action

Halima Kedir was thirty-five years old when her neighbors in Berbere district, in Ethiopia's Oromia region, began to mock her. She had started planting trees—banana, olive, and grevillea—in a landscape where such work seemed pointless to those around her. They discouraged her openly. She was striving for nothing, they thought, wasting her time and effort on seedlings that would not survive in a place where water itself was scarce enough that she had to walk for about an hour just to fetch enough to keep her young trees alive.

Kedir did not stop. She lost count of how many trees she planted over the years that followed. She became, almost by accident, an environmentalist—not because she had set out to be one, but because she had simply decided to persist where others had given up before they started. "They thought I was striving for nothing," she would later tell The Guardian, "but with time, many are realising that trees can be part of the solution to our problems as a way to fight climate change and food insecurity."

The shift came slowly, then all at once. As Kedir's garden took root and the land around her grew visibly greener, the attitudes of her community began to turn. The people who had once tried to dissuade her found themselves drawn to what she had built. Her neighbor Fate Abdulahi, watching what Kedir had accomplished, became convinced that the doubters had been wrong. Kedir had proven them so. She became a role model—someone willing to find local solutions to the problems her community faced. The very people who had been envious of her commitment began to follow her lead, planting trees of their own.

Kedir's relationship with her trees carried a weight beyond the practical. In the Oromo tradition of guddifachaa—the practice of adopting a child into the community—there exists a model for kinship that transcends blood. Kedir spoke of her trees in those terms, as though they were children she had taken into her care, bound to her by choice and nurture rather than birth. The connection was maternal, rooted in a cultural understanding of what it means to be responsible for another life.

Her work, though local and personal, sits within a much larger national effort. In 2019, the Ethiopian government launched the Green Legacy Initiative, a tree-planting campaign with an ambitious target: fifty billion trees by 2030. The scale is staggering. Between 2000 and 2025, Ethiopia had lost 560,000 hectares of tree cover to agricultural expansion, commercial logging, and charcoal production. The deforestation rate had been catastrophic. But the Initiative appears to have changed the trajectory. The annual rate of forest loss fell from 92,000 hectares in 2013 to 27,703 hectares in 2023. Forest cover itself rose from 15.5 percent to 23.6 percent over that same decade. The government reports having planted 48 billion trees in seven years, including a single day in which 353 million seedlings were planted.

Yet the numbers tell only part of the story. The real question—the one that will determine whether Ethiopia's reforestation effort succeeds or merely creates the appearance of success—is how many of those trees actually survive. A government-backed committee reported seedling survival rates of 83.4 percent in 2019 and 79 percent in 2020. But those figures have drawn skepticism from independent researchers. Studies of reforestation efforts in parts of Asia found that nearly half of planted trees failed to survive beyond five years. When researchers examined fifteen tree-planting schemes in Ethiopia itself, ten of them fell short of a 50 percent survival rate.

Yitebitu Moges of the UN Environment Programme in Ethiopia acknowledged to The Guardian that survival data remains unreliable, though she noted that the highlands have shown the greatest success. A systematic survival study is now underway. Even partial survival, she argued, delivers measurable gains—improved moisture retention in the soil, better soil health, increased carbon sequestration. The work matters even if not every tree lives.

Ethiopia will host the UN climate summit, Cop32, in Addis Ababa in November 2027. By then, the country's reforestation effort will have had eight years to prove itself. Halima Kedir's garden, thriving in Berbere district despite the water scarcity and the initial mockery, offers one kind of proof—that persistence can shift what a community believes is possible. Whether that proof scales to fifty billion trees, and whether those trees survive long enough to reshape Ethiopia's landscape, remains to be seen.