Global Sustainability & Environment Thought Leader
Francis Wanaswa, B.Com, MBA, MCIPS — three decades leading procurement and sustainable sourcing across five continents, and a lifetime planting trees on the slopes of Mount Elgon and the Kenyan coast.
Mission Statement
I plant trees, literally in the soil and metaphorically in people, communities, and systems, to restore what is broken and nurture what is becoming.
My purpose is to leave living roots behind me: ideas, opportunities, and landscapes that grow long after I am gone.
Regeneration is not just a climate strategy, but a way of life.
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Seedlings propagated and donated to communities
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Degraded farmland regenerated into indigenous forest
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Trees planted on the South Coast of Kenya
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Global procurement and sustainable sourcing leadership
Originating from the Niger-Cameroun region during the ancient Bantu expansion, the ancestors of the Bukusu migrated eastward through the Great Lakes region and Nile Valley before settling around Mount Elgon (Sikulu sya Masaaba) and establishing their modern home in Western Kenya. I grew up on those forested ridges on the lower slopes of Mount Elgon — a land of rich volcanic soils, sacred groves, and the famed cave elephants that shelter within its lava-tube caverns. Biologically abundant and spiritually charged, it was the cradle of the Bukusu ecological knowledge and environmental ethics that shaped my worldview from childhood.
Bukusu cosmology, rooted in the dictates of Wele Khakaba, holds that humans, animals, forests and rivers exist within a single moral order. Customs and taboos safeguarded that balance — forbidding the cutting of sacred trees, protecting water sources, regulating hunting seasons — environmental governance long before modern conservation frameworks existed. Alongside formal schooling, elders and ritual specialists taught me which roots and leaves healed, how to cultivate ancient grains, and how to harvest bamboo shoots and chiswa with restraint and renewal in mind.
That worldview travelled with me. For more than thirty years I have led procurement, sustainability and sustainable sourcing transformation with a leading multinational across Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas — working directly with farmers in the United States, Canada, Argentina, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and more than six African countries to prototype and implement regenerative agriculture and sustainable food systems.
Opportunities for Collaboration
As a lifelong tree planter, environmental advocate and sustainable sourcing expert, I offer speaking, training, and advisory services designed to inspire action and foster sustainability.
Keynotes and platform appearances that connect ancestral ecological knowledge with the hard commercial realities of global supply chains.
Practical, hands-on programmes built on three decades of planting, propagating and teaching restoration that actually survives.
Strategy, governance and landscape-level counsel for organisations designing regenerative systems that must hold up commercially.
A rare voice that can hold both a procurement negotiation and a Bukusu proverb in the same sentence.
The Work on the Ground
01
My rural family home in Western Kenya sits on nine acres of urban forest grown over decades — a private woodland that began as a handful of seedlings and now shelters birds, shade and soil that the surrounding ridge has otherwise lost.
02
I co-led a nursery that propagated more than one million seedlings — all donated to the community, including 5,000-seedling packages for schools across five functional tree categories.
03
In 2006 I acquired 100 acres of degraded farmland 50 miles from Mombasa and regenerated it into indigenous forest — more than 90,000 seedlings planted alongside expansive natural regeneration. The forest now supports beekeeping, agroforestry, and community partnerships, and planting continues as a prototype for the surrounding community.
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Along the Ramisi River adjacent to the forest, I am piloting riverbank rehabilitation that restores ecological function and protects the marine ecosystems of the Indian Ocean at Shimoni by mitigating wanton erosion.
05
During my corporate career in the tea industry I became a tea sommelier — a natural evolution for someone raised in a part of rural Kenya where tea is a daily staple, and a discipline that sharpened how I read quality all the way down a supply chain and back to the soil.
Writing & Thinking
Community
Environmental challenges such as soil erosion demand more than technical fixes — they require solutions rooted in community collaboration.
Read moreRestoration
Governments have poured vast budgets into planting campaigns, yet forests remain degraded and survival rates low. The failures are predictable.
Read moreRegenerative Agriculture
Regenerative agriculture promises restored ecosystem function — but implementation is constrained by structural and financial barriers.
Read moreSourcing
Smallholders, women and marginalised groups face structural barriers in agricultural supply chains. Inclusion is both an ethical and commercial imperative.
Read moreBooking
Speaking, workshops, advisory, or media — tell me what you have in mind.
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