My mother entrusted me with one of our family's prized possessions when I turned 10, a film photo camera. It was a clunky, solid, awkward piece of technology, and I was allowed the privilege of using the last four shots out of the 24 roll of film that already hosted valuable family memorabilia.

Eighteen years have passed, and I still have the photos - of my four friends and me - that I took back then. It hangs on the wall of my parents' house, encapsulating a time well spent.

An intrinsic part of development - personal or sociopolitical - is documentation. At the lowest level, it is documenting every milestone children make as opposed to a time when birth certificates were a rarity. As a nation, it is moving forward from sole-biased documentation of royalty to the importance of each citizen’s personal recognition.

Despite the advances of technology, Ethiopia is a long way off from properly documenting its history. We continually wrestle with irregularly recorded and mismanaged data. Even though most understand the importance of well-documented information, the execution of such initiatives is often inept.

Evidence of this is the recent tree planting initiative known as Green Legacy. The government set out with a plan of having 200 million trees planted in a day, breaking India’s Guinness World record by at least three fold. It was part of the administration's initiative to see four billion trees planted across the country between May and October.

The day of planting took place on July 29, 2019. Within 12 hours, the record was broken, with over 350 million seedlings planted. Yet, all we had for this was the word of government officials, and the media was only subsequently able to report the record with the cautiously optimistic, “according to officials.”

BBC reached out to Guinness World Record, asking if the reported documentation would be published. Guinness World Record simply requested for the representatives of the Green Legacy to get in contact with the proper documentation. So far nothing of this historic initiative has been backed by data, at least not to the satisfaction of the folks at the Guinness World Record or multiple independent observers. This should force us to come to terms with our ill-capacity of doing due diligence in carrying out such momentous tasks.

Regardless, our youth were motivated, and the nation was energised at a chance to make a positive change. Social media was ablaze with encouraging images of Ethiopians uniting for a worthy cause.