A journey through the Congo River Basin with Xavier Rouget of Fanyatu - "Just Do It"
The Fanyatu initiative is protecting and restoring forests along the Congo River Basin through the power of community-led permaculture and "action for knowledge." Communities have planted 8 million trees in 3 years while developing food, energy, housing and water autonomy.
The green corridor of the Congo River Basin is the "first and last lung" of the planet, stretching some 2,000 kilometers across equatorial Africa, absorbing more carbon than any other forest in the world while providing a vast biodiversity reservoir. From the headwaters of the great Rwenzori Mountain Range, the "Rainmaker" of East Africa, to the coastal mangrove forests of the Atlantic, a "one million hectare opportunity" is underway to regenerate the Congo forests, one of the most awe-inspiring places on Earth. We recently took a journey of the imagination there with mental coach Xavier Rouget, the Belgian founder of FANYATU, an initiative that partners with local communities in the Congo Basin to protect and restore the forests using the power of permaculture.
We learned of Xavier's work during the Africa gathering of the Global Earth Repair Convergence in May 2026, and were so heartened and inspired by FANYATU's powerful vision of supporting communities' food, water, energy and housing autonomy, essentially supporting people from some of the world's most vulnerable communities to gain their own freedom to protect the forest. FANYATU means "just do it" in the Swahili language, one of some 300 different languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You can listen to our conversation with Xavier as a podcast here, and watch the unedited version in two parts on YouTube. And you can read the highlights of our conversation below, where we have also included the links to several of FANYATU's short films highlighting their work:
In Part 1 of our conversation, Xavier touched on his previous life as a mental coach traveling the world, from Singapore to Argentina, escaping the board rooms whenever he could to connect with people and see the realities on the ground. Everywhere he went, he saw the same patterns of planetary destruction and extreme inequality. It became clear to him that the Western way of life is killing the planet. So 9 years ago he quit his job, and traveled to the Congo Basin determined to become part of the solution.
Xavier described the Congo River as the "most incredible force of nature." It is the world's deepest river; its sheer volume and power is on a scale that's hard to imagine. The river gives rise to a forest that is so vast it's believed there are places still within it where no human has ever stood. The forest's biodiversity includes mountain and lowland gorillas, okapis and forest elephants among untold multitudes of other wildlife. In some places, the 60-80 meter high tropical forest canopy is so dense that the forest floor is completely dark. The world's largest tropical peatland is also there, holding one of the biggest carbon sinks on the planet.
In Part 2 of our conversation, Xavier spoke about FANYATU's core principle of "action for knowledge." It is a methodology to create autonomy, as people gain self-sufficiency through developing permaculture skills. "Action creates the trigger in the system so you acquire the knowledge to change your life," Xavier said. "It is not just planting an organic garden, it's building the culture of something permanent. The idea is to create a system of belief and action that creates a permanent ecosystem of food, water, housing, economics, energy, governance – a system that protects and regenerates nature while providing for human needs."
In short, the Congo forests are some of the most intact ecosystems remaining on Earth. Before the Global Earth Repair Convergence, StoryMoss explored in conversation with Anastassia Makarieva and John D. Liu the critical importance of protecting these last complex, wild forests that keep water cycling on land through evapotranspiration and interaction with the atmosphere, known as the biotic pump.
With Xavier, we touched on what it actually takes for communities to protect rather than destroy the forest, when they themselves bear the brunt of a brutal colonial history. Between 1885 and 1908, Belgian King Leopold II claimed ownership of the Congo and ran it as his personal fiefdom. His legacy of atrocities contiued through neocolonialism and Cold War geopolitics, and still bleeds into the current day with a genocide that has claimed some 10 million lives, and in the relentless extraction of copper, coltan, cobalt, lithium and other minerals used in electric cars, cell phones and electronics. (Click here to watch a short YouTube video giving some context of the region's 20th Century political history.)
A Digital School and a Documentary Film
All told, FANYATU has impacted well over half a million lives, with more than 8 million trees planted over the last three years, raised locally and cost-effectively in community nurseries. As these efforts scale and grow, Xavier and the team are also developing a "digital school" to share permaculture and reforestation learning resources in multiple languages in order to reach more communities. It is an approach that could be adapted to many other places in the world, he said.
A documentary film of the FANYATU story: "Toza Batu: A Regeneration Tale from the Congo Basin" (see poster below) will premier in Brussels, Belgium on June 22.
Watch the trailer:
Support FANYATU's work here.
Visit the FANYATU YouTube Channel and watch these short videos to be inspired by what is happening on the ground:
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