The work on the ground

My homestead, which hosted the Mary Munei Community Resource Centre (MCRC), now sits within a nine-acre urban forest, standing where the largest tree nursery in the County once stood. What began decades ago with a handful of seedlings has grown into a thriving woodlot and living ecosystem. Despite the neighbourhood being now mostly built up, the forest provides refuge for birds, cools the air, protects the soil and continues to regenerate with little intervention.

Between 2004 and 2011, I co-led and sponsored a community tree nursery programme with Alice Barasa Nabwera under the Mary Munei Community Resource Centre (MCRC), a community-based organisation established in 2001. The Centre's mandate encompassed environmental conservation, scholarships, and community development, laying the foundation for what has since evolved into the Mary Munei Foundation.

In 2006, I acquired 110 acres of degraded farmland at Mkelekeleni Ridge in Mwarutswa Village, Kwale County, 50 miles from Mombasa. What began as exhausted cropland has since been regenerated into a thriving indigenous forest. More than 90,000 seedlings have been planted alongside expansive natural regeneration, creating a living landscape where biodiversity is steadily returning.

Today, Mkelekeleni Ridge is more than a forest. It anchors beekeeping, agroforestry, and riverbank rehabilitation, while serving as a prototype for community-led restoration. The project actively supports community seedling nurseries, enabling youth and women’s groups to propagate indigenous trees and extend restoration beyond the Ridge itself.

These nurseries, together with apiculture and livelihood programmes, ensure that ecological gains translate into shared community benefits. With wetlands, wildlife, and restored vegetation now flourishing, Mkelekeleni Ridge demonstrates how degraded agricultural land can be transformed into a resilient ecosystem. It stands as a model for ecological restoration, community partnerships, and nature-based livelihoods along Kenya’s South Coast.

I am leading the piloting of vetiver-grass riverbank rehabilitation along the banks of the Ramisi River, adjacent to the coastal forest.

These measures — alongside other ecological interventions — restore riverbank stability, reduce erosion, and regenerate ecological function.

By curbing sediment loss, the initiative safeguards downstream marine habitats, including the sensitive Shirazi–Funzi seascape along Shimoni, which sustains biodiversity, fisheries, and community livelihoods.

Raised in rural Kenya, where tea is woven into everyday life, my journey into the world of tea was both natural and inevitable. During my corporate career in the tea industry, I pursued the discipline of becoming a tea sommelier, developing the ability to assess tea with a trained palate and to understand quality across the entire value chain—from the finished cup back to the soil, climate and cultivation practices that shape it.

Through sommelier immersion I have tasted and assessed tea cultivars from China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya, Argentina, India, Japan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Rwanda, Uganda, Malawi and other countries across the world — each cup a lesson in terroir, tradition and the hands behind the leaf.

For me, becoming a sommelier was more than a professional pursuit. It deepened my connection to something familiar from childhood and gave me a different way of understanding the land, and the world. It sharpened my palate, but also my appreciation of how farming practices, soil health and stewardship influence flavour, sustainability and the livelihoods of farming communities.