Project final report on Plant your tree in Tizi n'Oucheg!

After two years of quarantine and travel restrictions due to the Covid19 pandemic, here we are back in Tizi N'Oucheg with the family to visit Rachid and his association and to give you news of the tree planting project.

Special mention to our friend Otmar, member and vice-president of Ecofund, who traveled by bike from Freiburg in Germany, in April 2022, to visit the project in Tizi N'Oucheg. In total he bicycled more than 3,000 km... but it was worth it!

Between December 2018 and January 2020, thanks to your donations via Ecofund, the villagers of Tizi n'Oucheg received and planted 1,785 trees financed by Ecofund, including 825 cherry trees, 30 walnut trees, 835 almond trees and 95 carob trees.

About 1,200 or 70% of the trees we financed have survived, especially the cherry trees on the irrigated land and the walnut trees near the river, which is a great satisfaction. These are trees that have already reached a certain size or "maturity" before planting, and therefore have been able to withstand very cold winters and the latest periods of drought.

Today, these trees not only survived but are already bearing their first fruits: to everyone's delight, in 2021 the cherry and cashew trees had already provided good harvests while the walnut trees were timidly beginning to produce.

The situation is different for trees which were still very small before planting and which presented themselves as "bare root": certainly, three times less expensive to acquire, these trees were not able to develop sufficiently dense and robust roots to survive the 2 consecutive drought periods. Thus, nearly half of these trees did not survive.

As Nourdin explains in the video, for the next plantings, the friends of the Tizi N'Oucheg association have learned from this experience: make sure before planting that the trees have reached a certain size or “maturity” for example thanks to a tree nursery. Training will also be organized on how and when to prune the trees, in order to improve their resilience.

Nourdin and Rachid confirm: this reforestation will make it possible to protect the surroundings of the village against erosion but also to fight against the rural exodus of young people, especially men, by creating a new source of income for families as soon as the trees give fruits.

However, this year 2022, Morocco is experiencing yet another year of drought: linked to the lack of precipitation, snowmelt is no longer as abundant as before. In addition, the open water channels favor the evaporation of the little water that comes from the mountains. As a result, over the year, 45% of the land is not exploited due to drought and lack of irrigation.

This endangers the efforts of the villagers of Tizi N'Oucheg to safeguard their existence but also to safeguard our planet.

As always, Rachid and his friends from the Tizi N'Oucheg association are not waiting, and they plan to pass the water through pipes to protect it from evaporation.

We want to help them carry out this crucial new project for the resilience of the village and already invite you to join us on the Ecofund website.

On behalf of the Tizi n'Oucheg Development Association, we thank you very much for your donations. Rachid and his team are happy to welcome you in Tizi Noucheg and show you their projects, but above all to let you discover this beautiful and charming region of the High Atlas.