By Norbert Mao
Kijani Forestry Limited, a Uganda-based social enterprise, an agroforestry company founded to combat deforestation and extreme poverty in Northern Uganda, has announced an ambitious target to plant 30 million trees by the year 2026, as part of its expanding environmental conservation efforts.
According to the company’s growth data, Kijani Forestry has steadily increased its impact over the past four years.
In 2022, the organization planted more than 1.5 million trees working with over 7,000 farmers in one sub-region.
That number grew significantly in 2023 to over 6 million trees with more than 20,000 farmers across three sub-regions.
By 2024, the company had planted just under 10 million trees in partnership with more than 30,000 farmers.
In 2025, the company targeted 14 million trees involving over 45,000 farmers in four sub-regions.
Speaking about the 2026 goal, David Lebeja Otto, Manager for Communication and Public Relations at Kijani Forestry Limited, said the company is focused on scaling up tree planting efforts to 30 million trees while strengthening farmer participation as 2026 target aims to engage more than 65,000 farmers across five sub-regions in Uganda.
The expansion is part of Kijani’s long-term strategy to promote climate resilience, restore degraded land, and improve livelihoods through community-based forestry
According to Uganda deforestation rate and statistics by Global Forest Watch, GFW shows that Uganda is experiencing severe deforestation, with estimates indicating a loss of approximately 122,000 hectares of forest cover annually.
Between 2001 and 2024, the country lost 1.2 million hectares of tree cover, equivalent to a 15% decrease in tree cover since 2000.
Meanwhile, Kijani Forestry Limited and Rubicon Carbon, a California-based, TPG Rise Climate-backed firm that provides high-integrity, science-led carbon credit portfolios and investment solutions for corporate decarbonization has signed a major agreement to supply Microsoft with two million tonnes of carbon removal credits generated from the Kijani Forestry Project.
Carbon removal is the process of capturing Carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere through natural or technological methods and storing it securely for long periods.
Kijani Forestry is a social enterprise striving to become the world’s largest, most effective, and most impactful tree planting company. Purposefully built to scale Nature-Based Solutions to address the changing climate and extreme poverty.
The announcement was made on February 10th by Michael Oloya Aliker Tebere, Director of Government & Partner Relations at Kijani during a meeting organized for journalists as Kijani officially released a press statement dated January 14th 2026, outlining details of the partnership.
According to Oloya, the agreement marks a significant milestone in efforts to combat climate change through large-scale tree planting and forest restoration where on January, Rubicon Carbon and Microsoft established a framework for 18 million tonnes of high-quality carbon removal credits, initiating a 9-year, 2-million-tonne deal in January 2026 for African forestry projects.
Oloya explained that the primary goal of the Kijani Forestry Project is to support communities most affected by climate change with investing in tree planting and sustainable forest management, the project aims to reduce carbon emissions while creating environmental and economic benefits for vulnerable populations.
The two million tonnes of carbon removal credits will be generated through reforestation and afforestation initiatives under the Kijani program. These credits will contribute to Microsoft’s broader commitment to becoming carbon negative.
Kijani says the project will not only help fight climate change but also improve livelihoods of small household farmers through job creation, land restoration, and long-term environmental sustainability.
