Tonthoza Uganja

There is a question that haunts conservation work in Africa, spoken quietly at the end of conferences and in the margins of funding reports: who benefits? Trees get planted. Carbon gets measured. Credits get sold. And somewhere at the bottom of a long chain of transactions, the farmer who tended the land waited to find out what share of the value she created would find its way back to her.

At the one-year mark after winning WAYA Rising Star for Southern Africa Region, Tonthoza Uganja was in the middle of building an answer — and making it verifiable.

Sustainable Farming Solutions operated in Mzimba and Nkhatabay, in northern Malawi, in the kind of landscape that development reports described as degraded and communities described as home. The work began with trees — with farmer-managed natural regeneration and agroforestry, with nurseries and planting seasons and the slow arithmetic of ecological recovery — but Tonthoza had understood early that the tree was not the product. The verifiable outcome was. And if the outcome could be verified, it could be paid for. That insight was the architecture on which everything else had been built.

The Smart Tree platform, launched in prototype at Kabwafu in March 2025, was the instrument of that verification. It tracked tree survival, land use, and income signals in real time, turning restoration that had previously been invisible to markets into something legible, auditable, and — in partnership with NBS Bank — potentially payable. By the reporting date, 266 farmers had been onboarded and tagged, with 622 targeted by early 2026. The platform was not elegant in the way consumer technology is elegant. It was elegant in the way a well-designed field tool is elegant: built for the conditions that actually existed, not the conditions a developer had imagined.

The numbers behind the platform sat inside a broader picture of growth. Farmer registration had risen from 1,400 to 2,867 over the year. Twenty-five village savings and loan associations — up from twenty — were operating across the communities, with 625 women participating, 40 percent of them youth. Household income for 622 farmers had increased by 30 percent. Beekeeping and mushroom production had become income streams alongside tree stewardship. Seven hundred and seventeen hectares were under active restoration management. Twenty thousand trees had been planted in the last season, with 100,000 surviving across the farms in total — a survival rate constrained by the erratic rainfall Malawi endured that year, and monitored in real time through the same platform that would eventually trigger payments.

That last point mattered. Malawi’s weather in 2024-25 had not been kind. Unpredicted patterns drove tree survival rates down to 60 percent in the field — a number that in another context might have read as failure. In Tonthoza’s framing, it read as the argument for the tool: because you could only respond to what you could see, and Smart Tree made it visible.

The year had also moved Tonthoza into rooms where Malawi’s farmers were rarely represented by someone who had stood in their fields. She pitched at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly as a Youth Ecopreneurship finalist. She spoke at UNCCD COP 15 in Saudi Arabia. She took the Builder Stage at Start Summit in Switzerland, making the case for farmer-first verification and equitable benefit sharing to an audience fluent in carbon markets and largely unfamiliar with Kabwafu. She became a Henry Arnhold Conservation Fellow with the Mulago Foundation — a hundred thousand dollars, and a network of people thinking seriously about how conservation and community economics could run together rather than past each other.

On the horizon was something she called the Mtengo Lab — an innovation and research hub that would house offices, incubate youth in agroforestry enterprise, and function as what she described as a continental hub for farmer-led restoration science. The name was Chichewa for tree. The ambition was that the work would outlast its founder.

There is a phrase Tonthoza returned to, drawn from Ubuntu philosophy: we are because they are. It appeared in her report more than once, and functioned less as a slogan than as a design principle — a description of why participatory decision-making was not a program feature but the point, why women and youth drove implementation choices rather than received them, why the farmer who planted a tree should know, in real time, what that tree was worth and when the payment was coming.

At the one-year mark, farmer payments through Smart Tree were still two years out. Carbon and biodiversity credit markets remained complex, slow, and not always farmer-friendly. There was still a dam at Kabwafu being choked by invasive weeds, still connectivity gaps limiting platform reach, still a funding ceiling that the demand for training kept pressing against.

But the infrastructure of an answer was taking shape — in code, in policy alignment, in VSLA groups, in the verified restoration data accumulating tree by tree across 717 hectares of northern Malawi. Tonthoza Uganja was not waiting for the market to come to her farmers. She was building the platform that would make her farmers legible to the market, on terms that kept the value close to the land where it had been created.