That single line is the whole strategy. Everything below is elaboration.
Mission
To restore vegetation along the River Rwizi and its wetlands, and to support the households of the catchment to make a living that does not depend on removing it.
Two halves, and the second is not decorative. Restoration without livelihood support is reversed as soon as the funder leaves. We have watched this happen, including once to our own work.
Vision
A Rwizi that holds its dry-season flow, with vegetated banks along its populated stretches and functioning papyrus wetland at its margins — sustained by the people who live alongside it because it is in their interest, not because someone is watching.
We are deliberately not claiming a return to a 1960s river. The catchment now holds several million more people than it did, and a vision that requires them to disappear is not a vision.
What we hold ourselves to
- Publish the survival rate next to the planting number, every time.
- Publish failures with the same prominence as successes.
- Never photograph or quote a person without asking first, in their own language.
- Say plainly what lies outside our remit rather than implying we cover it.
- Work through district structures, sharing credit, even when it is slower.
- Keep a control site, so that claims about our effect are testable.
- Label every figure with its source and date, or do not publish it.
On the language we use
You will not find "empowering communities", "holistic solutions" or "making a difference" on this site. Not because those things are wrong, but because the phrases have been worn smooth and no longer tell a reader anything specific.
What we are not trying to be
Not a catchment authority. Regulation of abstraction, discharge and sand extraction on the Rwizi belongs to national and district bodies with the mandate and the enforcement powers, and we have neither. Our monitoring records what arrives at six points; it does not license anyone or shut anything down.
Not a national organisation. We work in three districts of the ten the catchment touches, and expanding to the other seven would mean either a great deal more money or a great deal less monitoring. The where-we-work page names the gaps rather than shading them in.
Not a research institute. We collect a small, honest dataset and we would rather someone better trained analysed it than that we were the only ones who ever had. It is published free, with its limitations described, for exactly that reason.
Not an emergency responder. Riverbank restoration is a three-year business at the fastest, and an organisation that promises quick results on this river is either misunderstanding it or misrepresenting it.
How the mission turns into decisions
| The commitment | The test it applies | What it rules out |
|---|---|---|
| Restore the banks | Can this stretch be revisited at six and twelve months? | Sites too far to monitor affordably, however visible they would be |
| Restore the banks | Has the household farming it agreed, in writing, in their own language? | Planting arranged over the heads of the people who farm the ground |
| A reason to leave them restored | Does the household end up better off, not merely compensated once? | One-off payments for land taken out of production |
| A reason to leave them restored | Will this still be running when the funding stops? | Programmes delivered by our staff rather than by local ones |
| Publish what happened | Is the survival figure printed beside the planting figure? | Reporting seedlings planted as though it were an outcome |
| Publish what happened | Would we publish this if it made us look worse? | Quietly dropping a failed site from the average |
Judge us against this
If we publish something that breaches the list above, tell us. We will correct it and say that we did.