Impact in Focus – Eden: People+Planet:
Restoring Landscapes and Livelihoods in Kenya

As our 2025 #OneTeam for Kenya campaign gains momentum, we turn our focus to the vital connections between environmental restoration, local livelihoods, and long-term community resilience in Kenya. One of our trusted partners, Eden: People + Planet, is proving that climate solutions can be deeply personal—reviving both the land and the lives tied to it.

Across Kenya’s coastal regions, where deforestation, erratic rainfall, and soil degradation have upended generations of farming tradition, Eden is planting far more than trees. They’re restoring ecosystems, training future stewards, and ensuring that young people—like Amina, who you’ll meet below—don’t have to choose between staying rooted or surviving.

A Childhood Disrupted

Amina was nine when the rains changed. In her village near Lamu’s mangrove forests, farming had always followed a steady rhythm—guided by ancestral knowledge and seasonal patterns. But over time, those patterns collapsed. Flash floods arrived without warning. Droughts stretched into months. The once-fertile ground grew brittle, and harvests failed.

With each failed season, her parents faced impossible decisions: ration food, pull her from school, or sell livestock just to pay rent. Like many youth across the region, Amina grew up watching opportunity dry up with the soil.

But Eden offered another path.

Planting More Than Trees

Eden Reforestation Projects began its work in coastal Kenya with a deceptively simple goal: plant trees, employ locals, and rebuild ecosystems. But their success lies in how they do it—through deep listening, cultural respect, and long-term partnership.

Rather than impose outside solutions, Eden worked side by side with local elders, youth, and women’s cooperatives to co-design a restoration plan. The result: a mosaic of projects that blend regenerative agriculture, traditional practices, and climate-smart innovation.

Community members receive hands-on training in agroforestry, seed propagation, composting, and rainwater harvesting. Nurseries are managed locally. Farm plots are restored with native trees that nourish the soil and offer shade, food, or income.

And critically, young people like Amina are part of the process—not as recipients of aid, but as leaders in rebuilding what was lost.

From Scarcity to Stewardship

Today, Amina helps her mother manage their rejuvenated farm. Once dry and depleted, their land now teems with leafy greens, sorghum, and trees that hold moisture in the soil and nutrients in the crops.

They eat well. They sell the surplus. School fees get paid on time. And perhaps most importantly, Amina sees herself not as a victim of climate change, but as a steward of the land her grandmother once tended.

“This land used to feed my family,” she says. “Now I know how to make it feed the future.”

Local Action, Global Impact

What Eden is cultivating in Lamu isn’t just a local success story—it’s part of a broader global shift toward community-led environmental solutions. In Kenya alone, Eden has restored thousands of hectares, employed hundreds of community members, and helped bring mangrove ecosystems back from the brink.

The environmental data tells one story. But the real impact is measured in the confidence of families like Amina’s, who now plan seasons ahead instead of surviving day to day.

Your Part in the Story

Through our #OneTeam for Kenya campaign, your gift supports the regenerative, community-driven work of Eden and other local partners. Whether you fund a nursery, a rainwater system, or an agroforestry training, you’re investing in a model where healing the planet begins with empowering its people.

Join us on an Impact Journey to Kenya to see this type of project work firsthand. Meet the youth who are restoring what they inherited. Walk the fields where resilience is growing. And witness how restoration, when led by local communities, creates a future worth returning to.

Together, we’re not just planting trees. We’re planting possibility.

Join us

To learn more about or contribute to our #OneTeam for Kenya campaign or to contribute to our Impact Fund, visit richerlifefoundation.org/otk. To explore our Impact Journeys to Kenya, visit richerlifefoundation.org/impact-journeys.