Tree planting in Kenya

On Friday 10 May, along with partners LS telcom and Spectrivity, we were due to present our recommendations at a workshop in Nairobi.

But on Wednesday, to commemorate the victims of the recent floods in Kenya, the President declared Friday a national holiday. He urged everyone to plant a tree to help counter the global warming which had contributed to the floods.

Our workshop was postponed but we were invited to the Communications Authority’s tree planting event. The Authority has a long-standing project to plant 10,000 trees in Ngong, a rural community about 30 miles outside Nairobi, and we spent a morning getting a little closer to that goal.

It was a wonderful experience: about 100 people took part, many from the Authority’s spectrum team. A few hundred trees were planted on the lush green hillside overlooked by wind turbines. By the end, our hands were as red as the mud around us and we had learnt to avoid the stinging red ants.

But it was a memorable day, and great to see another side of what we know as “spectrum people”. 

The pricing workshop was held on Monday 13 May: we removed the gardening gumboots kindly provided by our Kenyan partners, Advatech, and went back to discussing spectrum, invigorated by having broadened our horizons.