Why the schoolyard
South Africa already moves food through its schools at enormous scale. The National School Nutrition Programme feeds around 9.7 million learners across more than 21,000 schools, which is roughly three in every four children in public education, and it cost R8.4 billion in 2022/23. That money buys food which is eaten once. A fruit tree planted on the same ground feeds into the same kitchen every season for decades.
The deeper reason is simpler. Almost every tree-planting project fails for the same reason, which is that nobody looks after the trees once the planting day is over. A school is the closest thing a community has to guaranteed maintenance: it has land, a water point, a permanent adult on site, a reason to keep something alive through the holidays, and a few hundred children who will be the ones eating the fruit.
What the research shows
These are the studies we lean on. We have listed what each one measured and how strong the design is, because an honest case has to survive someone actually reading the papers.
Growing food at school raises how much fruit children eat
Across 46 low-income schools in four states, children at the intervention schools went from eating 71g of fruit a day at school to 88g, while children at the control schools stayed flat. The proportion of the fruit they were served that they actually ate, rather than throwing away, rose by 9.3 percentage points. Where the programme was run well, that figure reached 12 to 17 points.
Total vegetable intake, by contrast, did not shift at all. That distinction matters to us more than it might seem, because it means the evidence base for fruit is stronger than the evidence base for the vegetable gardens most school programmes fund.
The study that found nothing, and why we take it most seriously
This trial compared expert-led school gardening against teacher-led gardening with minimal support, and found no significant difference in what children ate either way. Simply installing a garden and supporting it changed nothing.
When the researchers looked past the assigned groups and instead at how intensively each school actually gardened, the result reversed. Schools that genuinely raised their level of gardening saw children eating 81g more fruit and vegetables a day. The active ingredient turned out to be sustained use, not the presence of plants. This is the finding that shaped our pricing more than any other, and it is why the sapling is only R80 of a R540 tree.
A garden on its own does little; a garden inside a programme does a lot
Three groups were compared over fifteen months: a school garden alone, a school garden combined with hygiene and nutrition teaching, and a control. The garden on its own moved very little. The combined group saw intestinal parasitic infection fall from 37.1% to 9.4%, and handwashing with soap before eating rise from 74% to 97%.
The lesson we take from it is that a tree is a way of delivering a programme rather than a programme in itself, and that the cheap additions around it are where the health outcomes actually come from.
Tree cover on the school grounds tracked with better maths results
Across 318 elementary schools, of which 90% were eligible for free lunch, tree canopy on and immediately around the grounds was associated with higher maths performance after controlling for disadvantage, school size and class ratios. Grass and shrub cover showed no such relationship in any of the three cities the researchers looked at, and trees within the schoolyard itself mattered more than trees in the surrounding neighbourhood.
This one is correlational, so it cannot prove that the trees caused the results, and we will not claim that it does. What it does give us is a good reason to plant inside the fence and close to the classrooms rather than along the verge.
Which varieties you plant matters more than how many
Fruit supply across much of sub-Saharan Africa is not only low on average, it collapses in particular months of the year. ICRAF's work on fruit-tree portfolios deliberately combines species and varieties whose harvests fall at different times, such as early and late-maturing mango, so that a site produces across the lean season instead of delivering one glut and then nothing. Deep-rooted trees also keep producing through droughts that destroy annual crops.
So we plan each site as a harvest calendar rather than a tree count. Fruit on the ground in nine months of the year is a more useful promise to a school than twenty saplings.
Roughly half of all planted trees are dead within five years
Eighteen per cent of planted saplings died within the first year, rising to 44% by the fifth. The spread between sites is the part worth paying attention to: some kept more than 80% of their trees alive, while others lost more than 80%. What separated them was site conditions, species choice and, above all, ongoing management, rather than how many trees went into the ground.
This is why our replacement guarantee is a costed line on the price of every tree rather than a gesture, and why we intend to publish survival at twelve months instead of only planting-day photographs.
Testing our own claims
We make four claims on our home page about what a fruit tree does. Here is how each one holds up against the research above.
Feeds families with free, fresh fruit year after year
A mature fruit tree produces for decades, and the trial evidence shows that children in schools growing food eat measurably more fruit. Planting for staggered harvests is what turns this from a seasonal glut into something closer to year-round.
Cools, shades and restores the soil it grows in
Canopy cooling is well established, and the schoolyard greening research found that tree cover specifically, rather than any green space, was what tracked with better outcomes for children.
Roots a community around something they own together
The trials point the same way: the schools where anything changed were the ones where people kept using the trees. Community ownership is not an automatic by-product of planting, it is the thing that has to be built, and it is the part of the work we have to fund properly.
Creates income from surplus harvest at local markets
This one is plausible and widely reported anecdotally, but we have not found strong trial evidence for it at school scale, so we treat it as an intention with numbers still to come rather than a benefit we have already delivered. We would rather say that here than have a funder find it out for themselves.
What we will measure at the first school
Every figure above comes from someone else's research. These are the numbers we intend to produce ourselves, chosen because they are cheap to collect, credible to a funder, and directly comparable to the studies on this page.
| What we measure | How | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Tree survival at 12 months | Photograph and log every tree at planting, six months and a year | Beat 82% (sector year one) |
| Fruit harvested, by month | Caretaker logs kilograms per species per harvest | Months with fruit out of 12 |
| Fruit reaching the kitchen | Kitchen sign-off sheet checked against the harvest log | Share of harvest served |
| Learner fruit intake | Plate-waste count over two days, before and a year after | +13g per day (US trial) |
| How intensively the trees are used | Count of lessons and work sessions held at the trees | The variable that predicted intake |
| Cost per surviving tree | Total site spend divided by trees alive at 12 months | Compare to the R540 price |
That last line is the one we care about most. Cost per surviving tree, rather than cost per tree planted, is the number that makes a replacement guarantee mean anything, and as far as we can tell nobody in this sector publishes it.
🌱 Be part of the first numbers
Our first planting season is being organised now, and everything on this page becomes a measurement the moment those trees go in. Sponsor one and you will see the results.
Plant one of the first treesSources
- The effects of school gardens on fruit and vegetable consumption at school: a cluster randomised controlled trial with low-income elementary schools in four U.S. states — Preventive Medicine Reports
- Evaluation of the impact of a school gardening intervention on children's fruit and vegetable intake: a randomised controlled trial — International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity
- Nutritional and health status of children 15 months after integrated school garden, nutrition, and water, sanitation and hygiene interventions: a cluster-randomised controlled trial in Nepal — BMC Public Health
- Might school performance grow on trees? Examining the link between greenness and academic achievement in urban, high-poverty schools — Frontiers in Psychology
- Fruit-tree portfolios for nutrition and health: a new approach — World Agroforestry (ICRAF)
- Half of replanted tropical trees don't survive, new study finds — UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
- Empty stomachs, empty classrooms: investment in school feeding schemes — Statistics South Africa
Findings are reported as published. Studies conducted outside South Africa indicate direction and likely scale, not a guaranteed local result — which is exactly why we intend to produce our own.