Trees grow into sturdy business

India fund $350m

MASENO, Kenya, Jan 18, (Agencies): Armed with a solar-powered water pump for irrigation and a quarter-acre piece of borrowed land, widow Hakima Mohammed has become a Western Kenya tree tycoon.

Since 2013, she has sold at least 1.5 million seedling trees, mainly to local small-scale farmers, who are planting them as a way to boost their incomes from wood and fruit sales, particularly in the face of recurring droughts that have shriveled crops.

In the process, the 57-year-old has found a way to support herself and her family — and Kenya is getting a hand in its efforts to see at least 10 percent of the country’s land covered in trees by 2030, as part of efforts to rein in drought and meet climate change goals.

“This is a very good example of entrepreneurship which I would really encourage young men and women to take up, and do the same in other parts of the country,” said Eston Mutitu, a senior research scientist at the Kenya Forest Research Institute.

Mohammed, who lives in Mwiyekhe, a village near Western Kenya’s Maseno township, started her tree nursery in 2013, soon after her husband’s death following a short illness.

Officials at the forest institute, where she has been working for nearly 30 years in a low-level position, arranged for her to borrow a plot of land for the sapling nursery, a project she and her husband had talked about trying before his death.

With little experience beyond having watered tree nursery beds at the institute, Mohammed went to work planting an initial 20,000 seedling trees, hiring local young men to help her carry water from a nearby stream to irrigate the young plants.

That hard work became easier starting in 2016, when she acquired a solar-powered water pump from Futurepump, a company in Kenya that makes pumps available on credit. The bit of technological help has let her dramatically step up the number of seedlings she can raise and sell.

“This helped me increase productivity and now I have at least 250,000 tree seedlings on my nursery at any given time all round the year, given that I no longer rely on rainfall or manual fetching of the water to sprinkle on the crops,” said the mother of three, who was not educated beyond primary school level.

Mohammed’s trees have found a ready market among local farmers who, like her, are less concerned about the environmental impact of planting trees and more interested in the profits they generate.

India solar projects:

Mutitu

India will set up a $350 million fund to finance solar projects, Power Minister R.K. Singh said, as the country steps up efforts to achieve its ambitious target of adding 175 gigawatts (GW) in renewable energy by 2022.

India will need at least $125 billion to fund a plan to increase the share of renewable power supply in the country’s grid by 2022, underlining the immense financing challenge ahead.

The country, which receives twice as much sunshine as European nations, wants to make solar central to its renewable expansion. It expects renewable energy to make up 40 percent of installed power capacity by 2030, compared with 18.2 percent at the end of 2017.

“The country would achieve its target of 175 GW of installed renewable energy capacity well before 2020,” Singh said on Wednesday at an event organised by the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in Abu Dhabi.

Installed renewable power capacity is currently about 60 GW, and India plans to complete the bidding process by the end of 2019/20 to add a further 115 GW of installed renewable energy capacity by 2022.

Chinese solar boom:

A Chinese boom in solar panel installation last year helped drive global investment in renewable clean energy technology to record levels, a new study showed Tuesday.

After a dip in 2016, overall global investment in the sector rose 3.0 percent to a total $333.5 billion, offsetting falls in Japan, Germany and Britain, according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) study. That was the second best annual showing to date after $360.3 billion in 2015.

“The 2017 total is all the more remarkable when you consider that capital costs for the leading technology — solar — continue to fall sharply,” said BNEF chief executive Jon Moore.

Solar investment came in at $160.8 billion in 2017, a rise of 18 percent despite per megawatt capital costs falling by around a quarter, with China accounting for around half the overall total at $86.5 billion — up 24 percent, the study said.