Zanzibar Spice Forests: Women Restoring Edible Canopies for Life

How women in Zanzibar are growing edible forests across the islands to generate sustainable incomes and improve their communities’ resilience to climate change.

Thousands of women across Pemba and Unguja Islands are restoring degraded agricultural land by planting food and spice forests—growing back lush canopies across their island, and improving their income and food security in a way that supports a diversity of life and climate resilience.

The work is done by organizing together as neighbours in their communities and on the land, so that one woman’s restored area is connected to the next in a restoration patchwork. Their restoration agroforestry then provides a source of food and firewood which reduces pressure on the mangrove forests nearby, and directly helps with the restoration of those biodiversity hotspots as well.

Are you curious about what these forests look like? Step into the food and spice forests women are growing across Zanzibar:

Our story

In 2006, a community leader and climate activist from Zanzibar met a young Canadian tree planter travelling through the region. Driven by their shared passion for restoration, they set up 7 community tree nurseries, kickstarting a grassroots movement to bring back the islands’ lost forests.

That partnership grew into Community Forests. Today, we restore forests in Zanzibar and the Wabanaki region of Canada. Our work enables people to care for nature while earning an income, because climate action is only durable when it benefits local communities as well as the ecosystems they call home.  

Our campaign Community Forests was founded by tree planters, and to this day our restoration work in Zanzibar is supported by the generous donations of thousands of tree planters across the world. Every summer, professional planting crews across Canada and Australia donate a day’s earnings to support community-led restoration in Zanzibar. These contributions go directly to materials, seeds and basic equipment that allow local communities to restore the forests they rely on. This international solidarity, connecting people across continents in support of people and their forests, is at the heart of who we are as an organization and the communities we work with.  Our next tree planter-led fundraiser — Plant for Pemba — will take place in July 2026. By supporting this fundraiser, you will multiply the generosity of international tree planters to support restoration livelihoods in Zanzibar. With local food and spice production growing, we will use the funds to deepen the business supports women receive and facilitate the next phase of our work — creating high-value market linkages and peer networks to help women launch businesses to capture more value from what they grow. Over time, this creates lasting income streams that make restoration a practical economic choice for households in the region. 

To learn more the restoration your contribution would be supporting, watch this short documentary about our community powered work on National Geographic.