Ecodrive - Plant a Tree

With this purchase, you're supporting environmental change.

With your support, we are partnering with One Acre Fund, the Rwandan Government, and local farmers, to promote and verify sustainable agroforestry in Rwanda. Agroforestry has a key role to play in ending hunger and poverty in Rwanda. This program involves equipping smallholder farmers with the finance, skills, and expertise to improve productivity, soil health, and climate resilience of their crops. This in turn makes farming more profitable, sustainable, and resilient against climate change.

Agriculture is the backbone of Rwanda’s economy - accounting for one third of the national GDP. However, Rwanda has been hit hard by rises in inflation and today, approximately 45% of children under the age of five in Rwanda suffer from chronic malnutrition and one in four is undernourished. The hillsides have been farmed extensively leading to soil erosion and a loss of vital top-soil. A lack of trees on the hillsides that bind the soil have led to landslides.

At One Acre Fund, our community-led tree initiative equips farmers with the tools and knowledge to grow a range of tree varieties – from fruit trees and timber trees to trees that have soil health benefits. It also supports farmers to become social entrepreneurs by offering them the opportunity to become tree nursery managers within their communities. 

Tree varieties such as Musangu (Faidherbia albida) – which is indigenous to Zambia – are particularly excellent at fixing nitrogen in the soil (which improves soil health), has a root system that helps bring moisture to the surface benefiting the crops surrounding it and is also good at carbon sequestration – removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil. This carbon sequestration ability means that in Zambia we’ve been able to monetize tree planting via carbon credit payments to farmers. 

Planting fruit trees - like macadamia and citrus -  is another way farmers can make money from trees. They can sell the fruits their local market in addition to selling their traditional crops. Thirty-one-year-old Baraka Msemwa, from Wanging’ombe District in Tanzania, has seen his income significantly grow through planting avocado trees.