Confirm Land Rights and Apply

Before anything goes in the ground, confirm that you have the legal or customary right to plant trees on the land — this includes title, tenure, or recognised customary use rights. For collective or Indigenous lands, community pre-approval and governance sign-off are required. Apply through ChangeX with a description of your site, its current condition, your land rights status, and the community group involved. Savimbo reviews applications and prioritises sites of at least 0.5 hectares in humid tropical regions where agroforestry is ecologically viable. You'll receive an onboarding call, a digital pilot contract for reversible permission to collect data in your language, and access to Savimbo's field support team.

(Optional) Set Up Your Community Nursery

The nursery is the most important piece of infrastructure in this whole project. A mobile, pop-up community nursery — typically run by a women's group — costs approximately $2,000 to establish and produces Inga seedlings at roughly $1 each. The nursery doesn't require certification under most legislation, can be set up quickly with locally available materials, and dramatically cuts transport emissions and costs compared to sourcing seedlings from distant suppliers. Savimbo provides setup guidance, seedling specifications, and quality criteria. Nursery operators receive $1 per seedling sold to planters, creating an immediate income stream before a single tree goes in the ground.

Some communities prefer to do direct sowing of Inga or guamo seedlings. This means you don't need a nursery to plant, but you do need to plant within the Inga season in your territory. 

Plant Your Trees

Work with Savimbo's field support team to approve your preferred tree system. Sites can reforest, plant food trees within reforestation plots, or do agroforestry with Inga Alley Cropping or a custom system. 

If you choose Inga alley cropping or Inga intercroopping we need to design and lay out your Inga alley rows on your plot — typically one row of Inga trees every few metres, with food or cash crops planted in the alleys between them. Inga edulis is the recommended species: nitrogen-fixing, native to the humid tropics, and proven across 37 years of field research in Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, and beyond.

Plant your seedlings and document the planting with geo-tagged photos. You receive $1 per tree planted, verified by Savimbo's peer validator network. Your food crops — maize, beans, cacao, pepper — go in the alleys from day one, so you're generating food production while the forest establishes.

Monitor Survival and Collect Your Payments

At six months, a peer validator visits or remotely verifies your plot. Trees alive at six months trigger a $0.50 payment per surviving tree. At twelve months, the process repeats — another $0.50 per tree still alive. The whole payment structure — $1 at planting, $0.50 at six months, $0.50 at twelve months — is the core of the #SexyTrees mechanism. It rewards outcomes, not plans. You photograph your trees, submit your survival data through Savimbo's reporting system, and receive payment directly. The Inga trees are also delivering immediate agronomic benefits by this stage: their sweet sap draws insects away from your crops, and their pruned branches build a mulch layer that begins regenerating your soil.

Build Toward Recurring Revenue

Once your trees pass the twelve-month mark, you can choose to enroll in recurring revenue programs if they are available in your area. These include selling credits, from trees, biodiversity, carbon, and water data from your plot — drone imagery for tree-based carbon estimates, eDNA water bucket samples for biodiversity uplift assessment, and biochar records from any Inga prunings you convert using a low-tech Kon-Tiki kiln. These data layers are collected ex-post — measuring what actually happened on your land, not a modelled projection. As market standards mature, your plot becomes eligible for biodiversity credits (using the Interoperable Biodiversity Unit), tree-based carbon credits, and water credits — stacked independently, so you benefit from each market as it becomes viable. Your land stays yours. Your trees stay yours. The credits come from what you grew.