- Guinea has seen nearly 4,400 hectares (about 10,900 acres) of reforestation across 43 villages since 2021 under a project led by Switzerland-based arboRise Foundation, which employs hundreds of women to collect native tree seeds and using low-cost direct seeding techniques.
- The project shifts power dynamics by having women monitor the tree growth that determines men’s pay, challenging traditional patriarchal structures.
- Participants earn $115 monthly — 81% above Guinea’s minimum wage — providing crucial income during preharvest food shortages and enabling families to build assets like livestock.
- The initiative aims for long-term sustainability through carbon credits, with community-led cooperatives (majority women) deciding how revenues are distributed based on local traditions rather than external mandates.
For Mariame Condé, the seed-collecting work came at a critical time. In January 2022, she was pregnant and nearly out of food. Her husband had left their village to search for gold in Siguiri, a mining area, and their harvest was almost gone, she told Mongabay in a WhatsApp message.
That year, Condé collected 20,000 Carapa procera tree seeds from around her hometown in Kofilakoro, Guinea.
“The project paid me 1,000,000 GNF [about $115] which was a relief,” she said. “I used the money from arboRise to buy food and clothes for my son.”
Since 2021, the arboRise Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit, along with a local partner Guinea Local Development and Environment (GUIDRE), has reforested nearly 4,400 hectares (about 10,900 acres) across 43 villages in Guinea — an area about one-fourth the size of Washington, D.C.
In each village, arboRise hires local women to collect seeds from 40 native tree species. Each woman gathers around 28,000 seeds as part of a massive effort to revive forests in Guinea’s Kérouané prefecture, the region that holds the source of two major tributaries to the Niger River, which winds its way 4,180 kilometers (2,600 miles) through West Africa.
The mixed seeds are scattered onto plots rather than directly planted or grown in nurseries. Tree species such as baobab (Adansonia digitata), locust trees (Parkia spp.), African mahogany (Afzelia africana) and dozens of others are chosen for both their ability to store carbon and their usefulness to local populations as food or medicine.
“It’s one of the most low-cost ways to reforest because they’re not using nurseries,” Anne Dray, a senior researcher at ETH Zürich who worked with arboRise on research and serves on the foundation’s advisory board, told Mongabay.
The local men, who own the land (and are the only ones allowed to own land), provide 2 hectares (5 acres) of unused land for three years and protect the reforested plots with firebreaks and living hedgerows. In all, the work involves more than 1,000 local families.
ArboRise monitors the effectiveness of its reforestation efforts through satellite imagery, on-the-ground measurements by women monitors, and third-party verification required for carbon credit validation.
After three years, the women seed collectors transition to a new role as monitors, visiting reforested plots to assess tree growth, checking for fire or cattle damage, and identifying areas needing enrichment planting. It’s a shift in a traditionally male-led societal structure for many of these villages.
“The pay of the men will be dependent on the measurement of the women,” Philippe Nicod, founder of arboRise, told Mongabay. His local partner warned him, “That’s a huge power shift. Are you sure you want to try that? It could backfire.”
After one year, the arrangement appears to be working.
A lifeline during crisis
Participants like Condé, earn about $115 monthly — 81% more than Guinea’s minimum wage. The payment helps families avoid high-interest loans during the difficult preharvest period when food stores run low and new crops haven’t yet matured.
In 2023, Condé used her payment to buy two sheep and ArboRise provided a large tarp that makes collecting seeds easier. “After the seed harvest, I used the tarp to dry my rice and for my children to sleep on,” she said. By 2024, Condé had increased her flock to seven sheep.
The seed harvest season has ended, but Condé continues to benefit. She and other women in her village have formed a cooperative that cultivates peppers, okra and peanuts.
“I love this project because it keeps its promises,” Condé said. “We’ve always received everything in the agreement — and more, like fencing, tarps, machetes, plows — always on time … It’s thanks to this [project] that our lives have changed.”
Local partners
ArboRise partners with GUIDRE (Guinea Local Development and Environment), a local NGO with 25 years of experience in community development and environmental conservation.
The sensitivity to social structures while empowering women creates what Dray calls a “sensational” local partnership.
“I’m convinced that only by working directly with local people and with a strong local partner can you fight this tendency to force Western approaches,” Nicod said. Nicod, a former telecommunications executive, left his corporate career at 50 to pursue reforestation.
“The project fights climate change, supports biodiversity, and improves livelihoods,” Sékouba Condé, a GUIDRE superviser who has worked with arboRise since 2021, told Mongabay in an email.
When the project first launched in Linko subprefecture, in Kérouané prefecture, communities were hesitant, Sékouba Condé said. Now, with visible results, expansion to new areas like Damaro and Samana subprefectures has become easier. “Beneficiaries report health improvements and economic boosts from carbon payments,” he said.
In 2024, arboRise reforested 567 hectares (about 1,400 acres) in Linko and launched a 1,100-hectare (2,720-acre) project in Samana, in neighboring Beyla prefecture. These projects include 400 families across 17 villages, creating employment for more than 1,100 people, according to arboRise’s annual report.
Why Guinea?
As climate change worsens droughts across the Sahel, Guinea’s role as West Africa’s “water tower” makes reforestation efforts particularly crucial.
Guinea lost 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres) of tree cover between 2001 and 2024 — equivalent to 28% of its forest area — according to Global Forest Watch data. Deforestation is driven primarily by slash-and-burn agriculture, charcoal production and logging.
“If you protect the source, the river will keep going,” Nicod said.
The restored forests are already showing positive environmental impacts. Mariame Condé noted that a stream near her village that ran dry from 2021 to 2023 now has water year-round.
Funding and carbon credits
In the short term, arboRise has been funded by friends, colleagues, foundations and companies. Over the long term, it aims to finance the project through carbon credits. It has completed validation in most regions and established the first 116 monitoring plots in Linko for long-term carbon measurement.
To decide how to distribute these funds, arboRise and GUIDRE have established cooperatives of landowning families in each subprefecture, inspired, they say by U.S. economist Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance. Elected cooperative committees, with a majority of women members, decide how benefits will be distributed based on community consultations.
“It is certainly not up to arboRise to define how these revenues will be shared among the cooperative members,” the foundation’s 2024 annual report states. “This choice must be made by those most directly affected, based on local traditions and practices.”
In 2024, community members decided that rewards should be proportional to effort, that results should matter more than effort, and that even those who didn’t fully comply with all rules should receive some benefits to prevent them from leaving the project.
In October 2025, Rural Credit of Guinea, a microfinance lender, began distributing the first carbon credit payments to 290 landowning families in Linko, with remaining payments for each participating village following shortly after.
Dray noted that while the model appears scalable locally, already demonstrating a “ripple effect” as it expands, replication elsewhere faces challenges. “Finding such a local partner [GUIDRE] is a gem, and it’s not always the case everywhere,” she said.
The model’s dependence on carbon markets also creates vulnerability. “So long as the carbon markets are there and are working, it’s fine,” Dray said. “If tomorrow they disappear, they will have to adapt.”
Still, Dray, who teaches university students, said she sees the project as offering something rare in environmental work: hope.
“It’s very hard nowadays with our students in environment to bring positive stories of hope and optimism,” she said. “This story brings that hope, without being too naive.”
Banner image of families after sowing a field in Diassodou, Guinea. Photo courtesy of GUIDRE.
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Credits
