Festus Kiplagat

About

I design and deliver forest landscape restoration programmes that combine community-led agroforestry and FMNR with carbon-finance structuring, across a 20+ year career in forestry and restoration. As Founder and CEO of GPI2050, I've led an AstraZeneca (AZ Forest) funded 5-county Rift Valley programme supporting 4,500+ farmers to grow 40 million trees, scaling toward 26,000 hectares restored. Earlier, at World Vision International, I took an FMNR programme from pilot to 33,000+ households and 10,000+ Ha regenerated, then carried it through into Verra VCS carbon project design — building an M&E platform now used across 5 projects. I've secured funding at scale throughout my career, including a $2.7M pilot that grew to $5M, $10M in World Bank sub-projects, and a $40M restoration initiative, alongside established relationships with the World Bank, EU, and DFAT/AUSAID. I bring field-tested delivery capacity, carbon/MRV technical credibility, social capital and the stakeholder relationships to take a project from design through to investment-ready.