It started with a crisis. Refugees from S Sudan needed to fell trees to build homes, farm and cook. But we knew they could also grow trees. We recruited foresters and refugee youth, set up a nursery, and sought to understand needs. Three years and 450,000 trees later, we are happy to report that homes we work with have shade, poles, fruit, fuel to hand, more fertile soil and pollinators, and suffer less from weather extremes. Priorities now include natural regeneration of trees and scaling up.

In Southern Africa, heavily starch-based diets are common despite the array of tropical fruit, due to social and ecological change. This project aims to trigger the scaling of nutrition-dense landscapes in rural Zambia by working with 10,000 homes to grow carefully-curated portfolios of wild and exotic fruit trees. Produced by nursery operators we train, these trees will provide year-round diets rich in micronutrients, and bring families new earnings, and capture carbon and support pollinators.