Planting Economic Trees. Reclaiming Land. Building Livelihoods.
We gave 2,400 cocoa seedlings to 40 farmers in Araromi Ekiti in 2025. That was the beginning — and we learnt from it. Now we are building a model that puts economic trees into the hands of farmers, women, youth, and students across Ekiti State, reclaims degraded land, and creates income that lasts for a generation.
In the 2025 planting season, CANWYF distributed 2,400 cocoa seedlings to 40 smallholder farmers in Araromi Ekiti, Ijero LGA, Ekiti State. This was Ecovitalize Africa's first practical field activity — small by design, so that we could learn before we scaled.
The distribution reached farmers who had never previously received structured support for tree crop establishment. Cocoa was chosen as the pilot species because it is an economically significant tree crop for Ekiti State, it grows well in the local agroforestry context, and — critically — it creates income for a farmer's household for decades after planting. A cocoa tree planted today can still be productive in 30 years.
The pilot taught us things we could not have learned from planning alone. We identified what makes a distribution succeed, what farmers actually need beyond the seedling itself, and how a larger programme must be structured to achieve survival rates, income impact, and community ownership of the trees.
Scaling a tree planting programme without the infrastructure to support it produces waste, not impact. 2026 is the year we fix everything the pilot showed us — so that 2027's distribution is genuinely transformative.
We are using 2026 to establish a community nursery capable of producing
10,000+ seedlings annually, design the multi-species economic tree distribution
model, recruit and train community nursery operators, build the
distribution and follow-up monitoring framework, and secure the
partnerships and funding needed to make 2027's programme sustainable.
We made a conscious choice not to distribute in 2026 because a poorly
prepared distribution at scale does more harm than a year of groundwork.
The farmers who receive trees in 2027 will get better support,
better species, and a better outcome because we paused here.
Every tree in the Ecovitalize model is chosen because it does two things simultaneously: it restores land and fights climate change, and it generates income for the family that plants it. A tree is only planted once. The benefit lasts for decades.
The 2027 distribution is designed to reach beyond the farmers who already know about agricultural programmes. Women who farm but are rarely first in line. Young people who want to farm but lack a reason to invest long-term. Students who can plant a tree today that funds their future.
Every seedling Ecovitalize distributes is selected because it generates real, sustained household income. This is not a charity plant-and-forget programme. It is a structured investment in a family's land — with follow-up, monitoring, and market linkage to make the investment pay off.
Ekiti State has significant areas of degraded, eroded, and underutilised land that cannot support annual food crops — but can support tree crops. Ecovitalize's land reclamation approach turns these areas into productive community assets through strategic tree planting.
Reclaimed plots are GPS-mapped through iTONA AFRICA — creating a verified, permanent record of the land, its ownership, and the trees planted on it. This documentation is the basis for carbon credit applications, government land support programmes, and future ownership security for farmers.
The model works. The pilot proved it. What we lack is the infrastructure to go from 40 farmers to 400 — and eventually to 4,000. These are the specific gaps we need help closing.
Reach us at info@canwyf.org with the subject "Ecovitalize Africa Partnership"
₦2.8 million funds the full 2027 distribution — 5,000 seedlings, 100 farmers, three communities, six economic tree species. We are raising this through grants, partnerships, and individual donors who want to see a real, community-rooted tree planting programme that creates income, restores land, and fights climate change in Ekiti State, Nigeria.