When Trees Become Livelihoods: Dr. Tonthoza Uganja’s Vision for Restoring Malawi’s Farmland

Growing up, Dr. Tonthoza Uganja resented how little of the day seemed to belong to her. In her grandfather’s village of Yesaya in Lilongwe, Malawi, mornings began before school: water to fetch, household chores to finish, fields to work. In a home shared by about sixteen people and sustained largely by the farm, there was always another task waiting. What Tonthoza wanted was time to read. Some days, once the chores were done, she would hide beneath her grandparents’ bed with a book, hoping no one would find her and give her something else to do, least so, fetch firewood. The search for firewood frustrated her most. Why, she wondered, did something every household depended on have to be found so far from home? Why were there no trees closer by?She did not yet have the language of land degradation, forest loss or agroforestry. She only knew the problem as distance, labour and time taken from other things.

 

Years later, at Mzuzu University, Malawi where she pursued a BSc in Forestry, her studies gave scientific language to things she had already experienced physically: declining soil fertility, pressure on forests, agricultural productivity and the relationship between trees and livelihoods. She was “completely hooked” from her first semester. Eager to apply what she had learned, she returned home and told her grandfather they should plant trees. He was unconvinced. With sixteen people to feed, where would they grow food if valuable farmland was given to trees? His objection stayed with her. For a family living from the land, conservation could not be an abstract good. Every piece of ground first had to help put food on the table. Eventually, she persuaded him. They planted Acacia polyacantha, a fast-growing, nitrogen-fixing tree that could replenish the soil, provide firewood and, with its thorns, help protect the farm. Four years later, theirs was one of the few established woodlots in the area.

 

Then the trees began disappearing. People stole them until, eventually, the woodlot was gone. The lesson was uncomfortable: the idea had survived, but the trees had not. One family could plant differently, but a landscape would not change unless the people around it had reasons to protect what was growing. After university, work in Malawi’s tobacco industry with Limbe Leaf Tobacco Company brought Dr. Tonthoza into contact with smallholder farmers confronting the same dilemma on increasingly stressed land. What had seemed particular to her grandfather’s farm belonged to a much larger landscape. The Malawi Environment Protection Authority’s 2026 National State of the Environment and Outlook Report estimates that more than 80 percent of the country’s land is degraded, underscoring the scale of a problem she had first encountered on a single family farm. For Dr. Tonthoza, the environmental problem was inseparable from the economic one: why would a farmer restore land if restoration competed with the food and income needed today? Sustainable Farming Solutions (SFS) grew from that question. Dr. Tonthoza founded the organisation in Malawi in 2021, then continued developing the model while pursuing a PhD in Forest Landscape Restoration at Bangor University in Wales, supported by a Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future Fellowship. The academic work and the enterprise were pursuing the same problem from different directions: how to make restoration endure. SFS’s proposition is deliberately simple: “If restoration pays, farmers will sustain it.”

 

That changes what counts as success. SFS is less interested in how many trees are planted than in what remains several seasons later. Farmers regenerate trees already growing on their land or introduce species appropriate to their farms, while Smart-Tree, a digital platform, helps track farms and monitor restoration. Honey, mushrooms, seedlings and other agroforestry products create income while trees mature. Restoration is no longer something farmers are simply asked to do; it becomes part of how a household earns.

By the end of 2025, SFS had registered 2,867 farmers and put 717 hectares under restoration through agroforestry and Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration in Malawi. More than 60 percent of participants are women. Twenty-five Village Savings and Loan Associations serve 622 members, while 166 farms have already been onboarded onto Smart-Tree for monitoring and verification. But Dr. Tonthoza tends to remember progress in smaller units. One woman paid her child’s school fees. Another bought a solar panel with her earnings. Those stories matter to her because she understands the labour behind them. She has known women to work from four in the morning until seven at night, caring for children, managing households and tending farms. She remembers something of that rhythm herself: water, firewood, fields, then whatever time remained for school. That experience shapes how she thinks about farming economics. SFS teaches farmers to account not only for what a farm produces, but what goes into producing it, including the value of their own time. For women especially, making that labour visible and more economically valuable becomes part of the restoration story.

 

After proving that the model can work, the next challenge is scale without losing the conditions that make it work. The Schlumberger Foundation’s Faculty for the Future Impact Prize is helping SFS make that transition. The next phase aims to bring at least 500 additional farmers and more than 300 additional hectares into the model, while strengthening Smart-Tree, farmer monitoring and the livelihood pathways that give communities an economic reason to keep restoring land. Today, Dr. Tonthoza lives in Wales where she teaches at Bangor University and continues to lead SFS. She is candid about the demands of social enterprise: “Passion alone does not pay the bills.” The work asks farmers to reconcile purpose with economic reality; she has had to do the same. Her ambitions extend beyond one organisation. She remembers projects arriving in rural communities, completing their work and eventually leaving. She has since seen how easily progress fades when communities are treated as recipients rather than stewards.

“Nobody understands African land better than the Africans who live on and depend on it,” she says. Science, in her view, should strengthen that knowledge rather than displace it.

 

 

Her work has taken her far from the farm where the question began, but not far from the question itself. On her grandfather’s land, her first experiment in restoration ended with an empty woodlot. The trees had grown, but the system around them had failed. Years later, she remains interested in what happens after planting: who tends the tree, what it gives them in return, and whether, when no project officer is watching, there is reason enough to leave it standing.