About Excellent Development Limited
2010 Vision
Excellent Development is a registered charity working with small-scale community projects in Africa. Our 2010 vision is to plant two million trees in partnership with disadvantaged communities supported by an infrastructure of two hundred small-scale dams and water tanks.
Mission
To develop sustainable tree planting projects in semi-arid Africa, which will:
- Provide food, fuel and environmental improvement to disadvantaged areas.
- Protect endangered species of trees and sources of traditional medicine.
- Provide water for people, animals, tree nurseries and other crops.
- Provide employment, training and income generating opportunities for local people.
- Offset worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.
Approach
Excellent Development is focussing its public fundraising and administration processes on the Internet and e-mail to reduce both paper and energy use. Not only will this keep costs down but it also helps us to operate in sympathy with our environmental aims.
Excellent Development also takes a holistic approach to its overseas activities focussing on both development and conservation ensuring that we help people meet their needs in sympathy with their environment. All our work starts with people organised in self-help community groups and focussed on their needs and priorities.
"Since we started working together in 1985, we do what the people want rather than what we feel is necessary. We don't go to groups with set goals; we hear what they want and understand their thinking so that we can help them move towards their goals."
Joshua Mukusya, Project Consultant, Excellent Development.
Strategic Objectives
To repopulate endangered, indigenous and ‘income generating’ species of trees in order to both regenerate disadvantaged environments and enable the development of local communities.
- Establish self-sustaining co-operative tree nurseries and ‘seed banks’.
- Develop water catchments reducing the impacts of drought on the nurseries’ effectiveness.
- Outreach education programme with farmers encouraging the incorporation of tree planting into their agricultural practices.
- Enable employment and income-generating initiatives with charcoal, fruit and medicinal products, including enabling access to markets for individual farmers.
- Tree planting, managed in a particular way, has an almost unique ability to improve the conservation of the environment whilst at the same time providing opportunities for people to sustainably improve the quality of their lives.
The benefits of tree planting include:
- Water & soil conservation
- Firewood & building materials
- Fruits
- Medicinal products
- Organic compost & animal fodder
- Carbon dioxide absorption
The semi-arid environments of Africa are suffering from severe deforestation due, in part, to the need for fuelwood to support higher populations. 71% of Kenya’s national energy demands are fulfilled by fuelwood - 90% for rural people – with electricity only contributing 6% nationally. Lack of firewood impacts people’s health and nutrition due to the cost of cooking food. Additionally, the soil erosion and reduced retention of rainwater arising from deforestation seriously damages subsistence farmers’ ability to grow enough food to eat and sustain their livelihoods. Moreover, valuable tree species are facing extinction. According to Paul Harrison in The Greening of Africa, “Reduced tree cover increases soil temperatures which stresses plants and increases evaporation. Soil moisture, fertility and stability declines. More water is lost to run off. Wind and water erosion increase. Deforestation is therefore one of the gravest threats to ecological stability and food production in Africa”.
All life depends on trees and other plants. Through their growth they fix atmospheric carbon dioxide and create oxygen, creating plants that provide food, shelter, fuel, organic fertiliser, protection against soil erosion, water catchments and even medicinal products. Managed in a sustainable fashion, trees can provide long-term environmental and economic benefits for those willing and able to invest in them. In this way, they provide an exciting and valuable opportunity for disadvantaged communities and farmers to transform their environments. Not only are farmers able to benefit from the ‘fruits’ of trees but also their environmental benefits will improve the productivity of their traditional agricultural crops.
“Those who live beyond the borders of the world's industrial economy subsist on nature's surplus - on organic soil fertility for food, on stable hydrological cycles for water, and on forests for fuel. Environmental degradation, consequently, has direct, tangible results: hunger, thirst, and fuel scarcity. No line can be drawn between economic development and environmental protection." Alan B. Durning
Excellent Development’s tree planting and dam building programmes will conserve and improve the local environment and provide protection against the impacts of droughts, as well as providing additional food, fuel and income capability.
Our history
Simon Maddrell founded Excellent Development in 2001, achieving registered charitable status in August 2002.
Simon has been involved in community development activities since 1984 when he took a group of Venture Scouts to Kenya to build water tanks and dams along with a local self-help project.
He has since raised more than £100,000 to support a range of community development schemes in the Machakos district of Kenya.
On a visit to Kenya in 1997, he listened to the frustrations of the local community who were unable to get support from NGOs for tree planting programmes.
Having taken voluntary redundancy from a corporate career in 2001, he funded three pilot schemes in Machakos, Kenya and then decided to create Excellent Development to spread the model through eastern Kenya, East Africa, Africa and other semi-arid areas of the world.
Excellent Development is rare in the sense that it actually creates environmental conservation as a method to help communities develop economically – showing that development can be “environmentally positive” rather than only “environmentally neutral” in its impacts.