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: