Ask who raises the seedlings, plants the trees, and tends the young forest in Uganda’s restoration efforts, and the answer, more often than not, is a woman.
This is not a minor detail of forestry work; it is central to understanding how landscape restoration actually happens on the ground, and central to designing programs that genuinely support the people doing it. And yet, in much of the environmental and conservation sector, this reality is frequently acknowledged in passing and rarely reflected in how restoration programs are designed.
Who Does the Work
In the communities where we work, women carry out much of the skilled, day-to-day labor that keeps forestry and restoration efforts alive. They manage nursery beds, transplant seedlings, water young trees through dry spells, protect saplings from damage, weed around root zones, and carry out the ongoing maintenance that determines whether a planted tree survives to become part of a mature forest.
This work is physically demanding and requires sustained attention over years, not days. Restoring a forest is not a single planting event; it is a slow, cumulative process of care, and the people providing that care, season after season, are, in the vast majority of the communities we work with, women.
Knowledge Passed Down, Not Written Down
Beyond the labor itself, women hold a body of forestry knowledge that is rarely documented but is essential to successful restoration: which soils hold moisture through the dry months, which indigenous species will establish well on degraded or previously cleared land, which parts of a landscape regenerate naturally and which need active planting, and how to nurse a struggling seedling back to health rather than losing it.
This knowledge is not learned from a manual or a training workshop alone. It is built through years of direct, hands-on experience with the land -observing which trees have thrived and which have failed on a given slope, in a given soil, through a given season. It is frequently the deciding factor in whether a restoration effort takes root and becomes a lasting forest, or fails quietly within its first year.
The Recognition Gap
Despite carrying much of this labor and much of this ecological knowledge, women are frequently left out of the training opportunities, resources, and recognition that come with forestry and restoration programs. Many programs are designed around an assumption that landholding, planting decisions, and technical forestry knowledge sit with men while the actual, sustained work of nursery management and young-forest care is left to women, unacknowledged.
This gap has real consequences for restoration outcomes. Training programs that don’t reach the people actually managing the nursery bed or tending the young trees miss the opportunity to reinforce good forestry practice at the exact point where it matters most. Resources allocated without consideration of who does the labor can end up supporting people once removed from the trees themselves, rather than the hands keeping those trees alive.
What Roots & Canopy Is Doing Differently
At Roots & Canopy Agroforestry, this gap is something we see clearly in our own fieldwork, and it shapes how we design our training and engagement. Women are central to nearly every stage of the forestry work we support, from seed selection and nursery management through to field establishment and long-term tree care, and our training is designed to reach them directly, not just whoever is formally recognized as the landholder.
This isn’t a matter of sentiment or a checkbox exercise. It’s about designing forestry programs that actually work. Restoration outcomes improve when training, tools, and support reach the people doing the hands-on forestry work, rather than bypassing them in favor of more visible, but less involved, decision-makers.
Why This Matters for Scaling Forest Restoration
If landscape restoration in Uganda is going to scale genuinely, not just in the number of seedlings distributed but in the number of trees that survive, mature, and become part of a real, standing forest, it will scale on the strength of the people already doing this work.
Women should not only carry out the labor of forestry and restoration. They should receive the training, resources, and recognition that reflect the central role they already play in growing Uganda’s forests back. At Roots & Canopy, we believe forests are restored by the hands that tend them every day, and it’s time our programs, our funding, and our recognition caught up to that reality.
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