Partnership Must Create Value For Everyone

This post is for the young person who looks at what we have built at Nguni Nursery and thinks it has been smooth sailing. It has not. There are still days when I do not know where payroll is coming from. There are still months when we are fighting drought or extreme weather or trying to recover from it. There are days when one decision I make will affect this business for the next 2 or 3 years.

People compare businesses all the time, but ours does not work like most businesses. We do not sell T-shirts or products sitting on a shelf until next week. We grow living plants. Miss a planting season and you do not make up for it next month. In many cases the opportunity is gone until the following year. The trees still need water every day. They still need fertiliser. They still need people caring for them, rain or shine, funded or not funded. That work does not pause for a bad month.

I say this with real gratitude for an industry that has helped me build what we have. But the horticultural industry at ownership and management level in this country remains untransformed. I have had my own experiences of subtle discrimination along the way, among other things. You grow a thick skin doing this work. You have to.

Running a nursery and restoration business is not cheap. We have 12 permanent staff whose livelihoods depend on this business. We care for hundreds of thousands of trees every single day. The costs never stop. Fuel goes up. Electricity goes up. Fertiliser goes up. Vehicles break down. Pumps need replacing. Clients still expect the same prices. Funders still expect the same delivery. Nobody adjusts the number on their side when the input costs move on ours.

Then there is the part nobody talks about enough. People arrive with cameras wanting our story, our photos, our footage. They tell us it will showcase African entrepreneurs and community projects. We give our time because we hope it leads to something real. Sometimes it does. More often it does not. I say “NO” far more often now. Not because I do not believe in partnership. I do. I believe partnership has to create value for everyone in the room, not only for the person who needs proof for their funder or their client. 

As green entrepreneurs building on the ground, whether it is tree planting, food production, ecological restoration or community development, we need to protect our ideas, our systems and our projects. None of it is a hobby. It is what keeps me awake at night and what puts food on my staff's tables.

Too many project visits are extractive. Organisations pay for people to travel to your project. You take time away from your business to host them for a full day or more. You share your knowledge. You open your books. You tell your story. You walk them through your successes and your failures.

Then they leave. They have collected their daily allowance. Their flights, accommodation and salaries have been covered. They return with photos, videos and stories that help their organisation report to funders or raise more funding. The local business that made all of it possible is often left with nothing. What makes this difficult is knowing that the cost of one international flight, a few nights in a hotel and travel expenses could often pay for fertiliser for a season, repair a pump, buy irrigation equipment or help cover wages for local staff.

That money would stay in the community and strengthen the project instead of paying for another visit. I am not saying people should stop visiting projects. Seeing the work on the ground matters. I am saying visits should leave something behind. If a project creates value for your organisation then it should also create value for the organisation hosting you. That is what a partnership looks like. Not taking the story and leaving the people behind.

We hear a lot of speeches about putting local organisations first. We sit in conferences where people talk about supporting indigenous businesses and community organisations. It sounds good from the stage. On the ground it often looks different. There are major planting projects running in South Africa right now. I will not name them here, but the question has to be asked. How many local green entrepreneurs, not only NGOs and job programmes, are getting real entrepreneurial opportunities rather than tenderpreneurs collecting a contract.

National Arbor Month runs from the 1st to the 7th of September. The whole month brings planting projects across the country. As the trees go into the ground and the project coordinators pose for the photos, ask where those trees came from. Ask if they are indigenous. If not, ask why an exotic species was preferred. Ask whether anyone will monitor that tree once the cameras have left the site.

At Nguni Nursery we have spent years at a time applying for funding and government support. We meet every requirement on the list. We host government officials for countless site visits. We submit every document asked of us. We pay professionals to prepare business plans that cost money. Then the application goes nowhere, or we are told to apply again next round. We have done this application after application for years, meeting every requirement each time. 

Funding still goes instead to projects with no track record or to businesses that exist only on paper. The procurement system does not understand businesses like ours either. A tree nursery gets assessed the same way as a supplier of office furniture or cleaning materials. We are producing a living product taking years to grow, needing daily care long before it ever reaches a client. That is not the same risk profile. It is not the same timeline. The paperwork treats it as if it were.

We do not need more photo opportunities. We need partnerships built on respect. One Tree Planted is one of the organisations getting it right. They treated us as partners, not as beneficiaries. They listened when we explained what would and would not work in our own environment. We were able to change project specifications because we understand our landscapes better than anyone sitting thousands of kilometres away. We were trusted. When the targets did not make sense locally, we had an honest conversation about it and adjusted. That is what respect looks like in practice.

International funding keeps slowing down. In a lot of cases it has already dried up. We need to look closer to home. South Africa already has the knowledge, the entrepreneurs and the community organisations doing this work. We need local funders, corporates and government to back the organisations already proving they can deliver, not the ones best at pitching for the next grant cycle.

The videos on social media do not show any of this. They do not show the sleepless nights before payroll. They do not show the stress of keeping hundreds of thousands of trees alive through a drought. They do not show the weight of knowing more than twelve families depend on the decisions I make every single day. Good organisations across this continent have already closed their doors under this same pressure. Others are still hanging on. If we are serious about restoration, food security and creating jobs, we need to invest in the people who have already proven they can do the work. Not only when the cameras are rolling.

The solutions are already here. It is time to invest in them.