In 2011, at 20 years old, I believed I was the poorest person in the world. Not just financially, but because I had almost nothing. No food. No land. No father. No voice. No vision. And worst of all… no hope. I felt like I was swimming in an ocean of problems. Hunger haunted me every day, and trauma from the past sat heavy on my chest. Even when I tried to lift myself up, a dozen invisible chains—extreme poverty, loss, malnutrition, trauma, hopelessness, conflicts. But inside that pain, a seed was planted. I didn’t know it then, but it was the seed of multisolving—the idea that one action, rooted in purpose, could solve many problems at once. That seed laid dormant for years, silently shaped by every struggle and lesson I faced, until something powerful happened…
On March 4th, 2025, during a RegenIntel Foundations Course focused deeply about “Regeneration and Climate Solutions”, I joined a session with Beth Sawin. She introduced us to the concept of multisolving—the practice of using one investment of time or effort to achieve multiple goals, improve equity, and strengthen a web of relationships. That moment struck me like lightning. I was learning about regeneration, but multisolving—this—was what I had unknowingly been searching for over the past 13 years.
Because for me, this story didn’t start on March 4th. It began in October 1990, when I was just two months in my mother’s womb. A brutal war had just begun in my home country, Rwanda. A war that would scar the heart of my country and ultimately lead to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Over one million people were killed. Families shattered. Hope torn apart.
I was too young to make sense of what was happening, but it became the backdrop of my earliest years. My family fled Rwanda and spent three years in the forests and camps of the Democratic Republic of Congo as refugees. When we finally returned in 1997, we came back to nothing. Our land was gone. Our house dismantled. Our dignity stripped. We started life from zero.
We settled in Nyamasheke, my district in western Rwanda—at that time the poorest district in Rwanda, then the poorest country in the world. And my village, Ntango? Probably the poorest in that district. We were the forgotten among the forgotten.
I grew up listening to stories soaked in sorrow: of Genocide, war, exile, disease, disasters, hunger, conflicts, and betrayal. These weren’t just stories—they were our daily reality. I lived in these problems as a young boy growing up and trying to make a sense of the world. They shaped me. They scarred me. But in time, they also seeded something powerful in me: the deep yearning to become a problem-solver.
In 2008, I received a scholarship to attend Lycée de Kigali, one of Rwanda’s most prestigious schools after emerging as the best student in my district. For the first time, I encountered wealthy, comfortable, and privileged people—and realized I was probably the poorest person in the entire school. That realization pierced me.
It wasn’t just about my family. I came from the poorest village in the poorest district in the poorest country. That’s when I remembered something my mother used to say:
"When you kick a stone or any other obstacle on the road, remove it before continuing. If you don’t, it will break you again—or hurt someone else coming after you."
This wisdom became my inner compass. It sparked a fire in me to confront every challenge—not just for myself, but for everyone who would walk the same path after me.
But I wasn’t facing one problem—I was swimming in an ocean of them. And every time I try to solve one issue, three more surfaced.
A Journey of Searching
In 2011, I began a deeper journey—to truly understand my life, my community, and the roots of our suffering.
I left a government-sponsored program in dental therapy at the University of Rwanda in 2015 and began studying Sociology at Atlantic International University. I never completed the degree due to financial challenges, but the quest for knowledge never left me.
I devoured books. I attended countless workshops. Trained in agriculture and urban farming. I tried to understand why people like me—poor, post-conflict, traumatized—were trapped in cycles of poverty. And most importantly: how to break those cycles for good. I felt like I was carrying the entire weight of systemic poverty and inter-generational crisis on my shoulders. I was broken—but not defeated.
That’s when I discovered urban agriculture and organic farming. I saw how it could transform lives: putting food on tables, healing the soil, restoring dignity, and reconnecting people to nature and purpose. Over the last four years,I trained refugees in Kampala, Uganda—offering them more than food: offering them purpose.
Meeting Multisolving
In January 2025, I joined the RegenIntel Foundations Course, a global regenerative leadership program. Which brings me back to meeting Beth Sawin, the visionary behind the Multisolving Institute.
When Beth taught us about multisolving, it was like someone turned on a light inside of me.
For years, I had been navigating the complexity of poverty, climate change, injustice, trauma—and building solutions that connected them. But I didn’t have the words. Now I did.
Multisolving showed me that I wasn’t alone. That there is a global movement of people designing integrated, inclusive, regenerative responses to the crises of our time. It gave me hope, the language, the framework, and the confidence to fully embrace my work.
I imagined applying this framework to my life and the lives of millions of people swimming in the ocean of interconnected challenges and solve them or at least most of them at once, using one investment at a time.
At the same time, I was designing my final project for the RegenIntel course—designing what would become my most ambitious project yet: The Climate Quest. I was developing a simple concept: the Regenerative Life Garden For Food Security And Climate Action.
My focus was at the household level. How can we solve most of the problems that families in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing? Not just their household problems, but also solving global problems like climate change, ecological crisis, environmental degradation and
biodiversity loss? We really need multisolving. Still, I realized that there is something that I can do. Not to solve these problems myself for people, but to activate households to solve them for themselves.
The climate crisis is one of the greatest threats to humanity. While we are all victims, we are also contributors, and thus, all responsible for solutions. However, the reality in Sub-Saharan Africa is complex: communities, especially urban and refugee populations, face intersecting daily crises: food insecurity, poverty, malnutrition, waste mismanagement, and loss of livelihood. In such a context, climate action is often a distant concept.
My Climate Quest: Regenerative Life Garden For Food Security And Climate Action, addresses this paradox. It empowers vulnerable households to regenerate life, purpose, hope, nature and ecosystems while meeting their basic needs through climate-smart, community-led, zero-waste solutions.
The Regenerative Life Garden (RLG) is an innovative, regenerative, and climate-resilient gardening system designed to maximize food production, soil health, biodiversity restoration, household waste management and environmental benefits in limited spaces. It is a vertical, multi-layered garden with an integrated composting area at the center, allowing continuous nutrient cycling and self-sufficiency.
Through Regenerative Life Garden (RLG), a family is able to:
- Grow more food in less space using vertical layers, providing long-term food security with minimal maintenance.
- Recycle household waste into compost and biochar hence reducing carbon footprint
- Generate income through the sale of organic produces
- Continuously improve soil health fertility and sequester carbon through the use of biochar and composting without external fertilizers.
- Protect biodiversity by incorporating pollinator-friendly plants, and creating a conducive environment for microbial diversity in the garden
- Zero-waste principles, and regenerative living at the household and community level using aerobic composting, and other regenerative agricultural best practices.
- Be easily adapted in different environments, allowing garden size adjustments based on available space and family needs.
My vision is to scale the Regenerative Life Garden to become a continental movement—helping disadvantaged families build self-reliance, climate resilience, and community regeneration, all while contributing to global climate goals. It is to create a world where every household regenerates nature, combats climate change, and secures food through RLG.
My mission is to empower communities with regenerative
tools and practices that restore ecosystems and meet human needs.
The long-term ambition is to inspire 1 billion RLGs by 2050, each capable of sequestering carbon and reversing degradation from homes to schools, refugee camps to institutions.
Why Multisolving is the Way Forward
Our world is facing an unprecedented convergence of crises: climate breakdown, economic inequality, food insecurity, youth unemployment, biodiversity collapse, and social fragmentation.
We can no longer afford siloed solutions.
Multisolving is not a luxury—it’s a necessity.
It’s the only way we can design systems that work for people, for the planet, and for future generations.
The Regenerative Life Garden doesn’t ask people to choose between eating and acting on climate. It doesn’t ask youth to pick between healing and earning. It says: Let’s do both. Let’s do it all. Together.
Because that’s what multisolving is: a practice of courage, of integration, of solidarity.
Join the Climate Quest
I believe that regeneration is not just a method. It is a movement of the heart. A way of seeing the world not as broken into parts, but as a living whole—where every solution must be as interconnected as the problems it seeks to address.
The Regenerative Life Garden is my offering to this vision. The Climate Quest is the road we are walking. And I invite you to join us.
Let’s co-create a world where no one is left behind. A world where gardens are not just spaces of survival, but sanctuaries of regeneration.
Let’s multisolve—together.
