Supporting Environmental Projects

Why We Support Ripple Africa

10 trees are planted each month for every aZtec employee

Ripple Africa was set up by aZtec’s founder, Geoffrey Furber, and his wife Liz in 2003. The charity’s main focus is to empower communities so they can achieve a sustainable future.

Ripple Africa strongly believes that local people are the solution to many of the challenges they face as a community. To this end, every project Ripple Africa runs is a proactive response to the community’s needs, by giving the local people the tools to change their environment and therefore their lives.

Ripple Africa’s belief is “Providing a hand UP and not a hand out,” and that philosophy has been central to the charity’s ideology for nearly two decades.

aZtec continues to support this charity and every month plants 10 trees for each employee. With more than 300 people employed, we are planting over 40,000 trees each year.

What does this mean for our customers?

For a single cleaner commercial cleaning contract of 10 hours per week, aZtec are ensuring 120 trees are planted each year.

About Ripple Africa

We work with farmers and communities who are planting millions of trees each year, and these provide a sustainable source of timber and firewood for local people.

Our tree farmers also plant fruit trees to provide food and income for their families. They grow mango, papaya, guava, avocado and citrus fruit trees.

It is not only about tree planting but inspiring communities to protect their local forests too. By communities having a sustainable source of timber through our tree planting project means that they are able to now conserve existing forests with indigenous trees and allow natural regeneration to take place.

We work with over 1,700 Forest Conservation Committee members patrolling 340 sq.kms of forest. They educate community members on the problems of deforestation and the important of protecting trees.

Our other large-scale Environment projects include fuel-efficient cookstoves – which use less wood thus protecting forests even more – and fish conservation.

We also run small-scale Education and Healthcare projects.

Visit www.rippleafrica.org