None of this is complicated. It is negotiating with the person farming the bank, raising seedlings that suit the site, planting in the wet season, and coming back twice to count what lived.
The six programmes
- 01
River and wetland restoration
Buffer strips negotiated household by household, replanted, and monitored for at least a year. The core of what we do.
Read more - 02
Tree planting and agroforestry
Indigenous seedlings raised in local nurseries and planted where they will actually survive, on banks and on farms.
Read more - 03
Environmental education
School programmes run by the schools' own teachers, plus training for the adults whose livelihood the river affects.
Read more - 04
Community livelihoods
Alternatives for households that currently make a living from the wetland. The part that makes restoration hold.
Read more - 05
Water and sanitation
Rainwater harvesting at schools and institutions, which takes daily foot traffic off fragile banks.
Read more - 06
Climate resilience
Planning for a rainfall pattern that has stopped behaving predictably. Drought and flood work threaded through everything else.
Read more
How a site actually happens
- 1
Walk the stretch
On foot, with GPS and a camera, recording the state of the bank before anything is promised. Without a baseline there is no honest claim of improvement later.
- 2
Find out who owns and who uses
Almost never the same person. Planting without the agreement of whoever farms the land produces seedlings that are gone within a month.
- 3
Agree the buffer
How wide, for how long, and what the household gets in return. In writing where the household is comfortable with that, verbally and witnessed where they are not.
- 4
Plant in the wet season
With species matched to the site rather than to whatever the nursery has surplus of. Bank species where the water rises, farm species behind the line.
- 5
Return at six and twelve months
Count survivors, replace losses, photograph the fixed point, publish the rate. This is the step that gets cut when money is short and the step that decides whether any of it mattered.
What we do not do
We do not run enforcement, we do not test for heavy metals, and we do not claim to have addressed industrial effluent or the sand trade. Those are regulatory matters for national bodies. We monitor, we publish, and we say so.
The follow-up visits are what need funding
Planting days attract support easily. The second and third visit, eighteen months later, in a vehicle that needs fuel, attract almost none. That gap is where restoration succeeds or quietly fails.