ABOUT RLG
RLG is built from lived experience & designed for systemic change.
Regenerative Life Garden was founded by David Munezero in Uganda, grounded in his lived experience working with vulnerable communities. Today, we’re a coalition of practitioners and partners scaling this model across Sub-Saharan Africa.
HOW IT BEGAN
David’s Journey: From Survival to Systems Thinking
David Munezero was born in Rwanda in 1991, during the early days of a brutal war that would culminate in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. His earliest years were spent as a refugee in the forests and camps of the Democratic Republic of Congo. When his family returned in 1997, they returned to nothing: no land, no house, no resources. In the poorest district of Rwanda, David grew up immersed in the everyday realities of hunger, poverty, and loss. These experiences were not stories he heard, they were the air he breathed, shaping how he understood the world.
Through it all, he carried the wisdom of his mother:
“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 principle became a compass for navigating challenges far beyond his childhood home.
A Journey of Curiosity and Learning
In 2008, David earned a scholarship to attend Lycée de Kigali. Surrounded by students from privileged backgrounds, he realized the stark contrast between his life and theirs. He began a deeper quest to understand the roots of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and social inequity, leaving a government dental therapy program and scholarship to study Sociology and regenerative agriculture. He trained in urban farming, regenerative solutions, and life gardening, skills that would later inform the design of the Regenerative Life Garden (RLG).
Since 2022-2025, David was leading urban farming initiatives at the Jesuit Refugee Service in Kampala, Uganda. He established a demonstration gardens and three community gardens, training more than 450 refugees and vulnerable residents. He realized that food insecurity, climate vulnerability, and environmental degradation were intertwined and that solutions needed to reflect that complexity.
Discovering Multisolving and Language of Solutions
In early 2025, David joined the RegenIntel Fellowship, where he met Elizabeth Sawin and was introduced to the concept of multisolving — designing one initiative to simultaneously tackle multiple challenges while improving equity and strengthening relationships. For David, it was a revelation. He had spent years confronting complex, overlapping problems without a framework to connect them. Now he had one.
The Birth of the Regenerative Life Garden
Out of this insight, lived experiences and hands-on trials and failures, the Regenerative Life Garden (RLG) was born in his imagination. More than just a garden, he saw a system of solutions: a vertical, multi-layered garden with integrated composting area at the center. A garden that regenerates soil, sequesters carbon, preserves biodiversity, manages waste, and improves household nutrition. A garden that empowers families to act locally while contributing to global climate and food security goals. Each garden is a household-level hub of climate action, a microcosm of resilience, agency, and regenerative impact.
David’s vision extends beyond individual households. He imagines a network of RLGs across urban and vulnerable communities, schools, and institutions—each contributing to stronger food systems, healthier soils, and community-led climate solutions. The pilot phase in Kampala, started from July 2025 to January 2026, established demonstration sites, trained local champions, and created models for replication across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Today: Climate Quest and Systems Impact
David describes his mission as a “Climate Quest”, which originally started to take root as part of the RegenIntel Fellowship final project. This is an initiative that blends human agency, practical design, and regenerative systems thinking. He is committed to scaling RLGs to inspire one billion households by 2050, creating tangible climate and community benefits while cultivating resilience, dignity, and food sovereignty. Every garden is a practical expression of multisolving: addressing local needs while linking to broader ecological, social, and economic systems.
Through RLG, David continues to integrate lessons from his lived experience with global regenerative practice. His work demonstrates that meaningful climate action begins at home, within communities, and in systems designed to solve multiple challenges at once.
