In September 2024, Dr. Isaac Kalua Green (the same Chief Steward behind Plant Your Age) published a proposal called My35: every Kenyan personally plants and maintains 35 verified living trees a year, connecting individual ownership directly to Kenya’s national ambition of 15 billion trees. It opens with a challenge, not a call to action:
“Before planting another tree, pause. Return quietly to the last one you planted. Tell no one you are coming. Is it alive?”
That single question is the same one Plant Your Age asks at scale. Where My35 proposes a fixed number for every Kenyan (35, regardless of who you are), Plant Your Age ties the number to something more personal: your own age, your family’s combined ages, your company’s years in business, your nation’s population. Different arithmetic, identical doctrine: planting is not the same as survival, and only a verified, accountable number counts.
The Scale, Either Way You Run It
My35’s own numbers make the case for why individual ownership matters at all. Kenya’s population is projected at 54.2 million. Thirty-five verified trees per person is almost 1.9 billion trees mobilised in a single growing season: more than the 1.7 billion the Deputy President has reported planted since 2022, and unlike that figure, tied to a name and an address for every one of them. My35 proposes funding it at KSh 250 per verified living tree, or KSh 8,750 per full 35-tree commitment.
That figure is worth sitting with next to Plant Your Age’s own published cost of KSH 350 per tree for a full year of care (see our seedling cost breakdown). The two numbers differ, and in the spirit both initiatives share, we’re not going to paper over that rather than flag it. Different scopes, different assumptions, possibly different years of costing, but a campaign built on “is it alive?” as its first question owes the same question to its own numbers before anyone else’s.
Five Categories, One Household
My35 organises each family’s 35 trees into five groups of seven: food production, income generation, farm and livestock support, water, shade and protection, and nature conservation for future generations. It’s tracked through what the proposal calls Green Household Accounts: recording ownership, location, care, survival and value for every tree, with Kenya Forest Service, KEFRI, counties, corporations and families each holding a role, and independent verification protecting the whole system from becoming just another self-reported number.
Leadership That Plants With, Not For
My35 reframes what presidential participation in tree planting should mean: “The President does not plant for Kenyans. He plants with them.” It’s the same idea behind every stage of Plant Your Age’s own history: Kibaki completing his own 80-tree collection in 2012, not cutting a ribbon in front of someone else’s; 47 schoolchildren planting the Living Legacy Garden themselves in 2019, not watching it planted for them.
Two initiatives, one founder, one non-negotiable standard: a tree that isn’t verified alive doesn’t count, no matter which number got it into the ground in the first place. Whichever number gets you started, whether it’s your age, your family’s combined years, or the fixed 35 My35 asks of every Kenyan, the standard afterward is identical: come back, alone, and check if it’s alive.