Doris Njagi

Doris Njagi grew up on the slopes of Mount Kenya, watching smallholder farmers toil on land that her own family knew intimately. The mountain she remembers has changed: The snow has thinned, the seasons have turned unpredictable and the forests that once ringed its base are receding under illegal deforestation. Today, she is working to restore the very forests she watched as a child.

Before founding Forest Restored, Doris spent more than a decade in climate finance as a banker, learning how capital moves — and why it so rarely reaches the people doing the hardest environmental work. Forest Restored is her answer. The social enterprise restores degraded land across East Africa by making it pay for smallholder farmers to grow native trees: It uses carbon finance to front the cost of agroforestry, pays farmers through the lean early years, connects them to markets for fruit, fodder, honey and timber, and verifies every tree with low-cost artificial intelligence.

To date, her work spans more than 60,000 smallholder farmers and some 105,000 hectares under restoration. That verification layer sets her apart. Forest Restored pairs satellite and drone imagery with acoustic sensors that listen for returning birdsong and bee colonies — and for the chainsaws and charcoal fires that signal a forest under threat. The result is carbon and biodiversity data credible enough to command premium prices while keeping the majority of every sale in farmers’ hands. For Doris, restoring an ecosystem and lifting a household out of poverty are the same act.