By Dr. Oumer H. Oba, Ambassador of Ethiopia to Pakistan
On 3rd August 2026, about one in every five Ethiopians put down their usual work and picked up a shovel. Be it a minister, diplomat, farmer or student, everybody went out to plant hope for our future generations.
According to the official estimates, more than 26 million people took part in the largest single-day plantation in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE). By the end of the day, they had planted 800 million young trees. No country has ever planted so many in a single day.
The effort was not a sudden burst of enthusiasm. It is part of the Green Legacy Initiative, launched in 2019 by Prime Minister H.E. Dr. Abiy Ahmed for fast-tracking afforestation and reforestation efforts to achieve food security, avert land degradation and promote green economy.
The first target was four billion seedlings. Ethiopia beat it, planting 4.7 billion, including 350 million in one day, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. Every year since, the target has climbed higher, and tree planting has become part of what it means to be Ethiopian.
The numbers are hard to take in, but it is an absolute reality. In 2020, even as the pandemic spread, the country planted 5.9 billion seedlings. It managed 6.8 billion the following year and 7.2 billion in 2022, as the work widened from planting trees to repairing whole landscapes. In both 2023 and 2024 the figure reached 7.5 billion, taking the running total past 32 billion trees, the ministry’s figures show.
This is not simply a matter of planting saplings and hoping for rain. Native trees and fruit trees now make up 57% of what goes into the ground, so communities can earn something from them as well as benefit from the shade and the soil they hold together.
On top of that, 85% of seedlings survive, and these stats are not just on the paper but ensured through digital monitoring. Half of all planting sites are due to be recorded by GPS. The goal for 2025 was to push the running total past 40 billion trees, and the target for 2026 is eight billion in a single year.
To this day, Ethiopia has planted more than 48 billion seedlings and the effect is already visible. In 2019, when the initiative began, forests covered 17.2% of Ethiopia. By 2023 that had risen to 23.6% as reported by the Ministry of Agriculture.
For a country long troubled by drought and a changing climate, these growing forests are more than a policy. They are an attempt to plant a safer future, one that the children of today’s planters will live in, and breathe.
The harder work, though, comes after the crowds go home. A seedling in the ground is only a promise; it becomes a forest only if it is watered, protected from grazing animals and left standing for years. That is a quieter task than a national planting day, and a far longer one but what the programme has already achieved is a change in habit.
Planting trees has moved from the margins of policy to something close to a national ritual, repeated every year by tens of millions of people, from cabinet ministers to schoolchildren. Few countries have persuaded so many of their citizens to take part in a single environmental effort for so long, and fewer still have kept raising the target each time.
That is perhaps the real legacy: not one record-breaking day, but the idea that restoring a landscape is ordinary work, done a little at a time, by everyone. Ethiopia has spent seven years planting something that will secure the future of not only its own citizens but also entire Africa and the world. The verdict will not come from officials or their figures. It will come from a generation that will simply walk in these forests, breath fresh air and reap the fruits from the grown up trees.
