About Us.
Avara is a regenerative farm, village, and learning ecosystem rooted in regeneration, reciprocity, and community-led learning.
Here, we return to the wisdom of the land, so both humans and nature can thrive together.
Our goal is to establish a way forward that restores and regenerates, produces high-quality food, and supports people everyday through meaningful, rooted systems.
Located on the banks of the Okavango River in Namibia, Avara sits within one of the country's most ecologically rich, and most under-resourced landscapes. The river brings life: water, fertile soil, and the possibility of abundance. Yet the surrounding communities face persistent food insecurity, limited access to agricultural knowledge, and land that has been degraded over time by extractive and unsustainable practices.
Avara began as a direct response to this reality. Not as an intervention from the outside, but as a living practice built from within. One that takes what is already here - the water, the sunshine, the land, the people, the natural resources around - and shows what is possible when knowledge, care, and long-term thinking are added to the mix.
Now, Our Vision has spread further a field, establishing Namibia’s first Agroforestry Hub - read more below.
Agroforestry Hub.
Avara is the first project of its kind in Namibia, and from the beginning, the intention has been bigger than the land we sit on.
We are building a living Hub - a place where agroforestry knowledge, materials, and practice flow outward into the wider landscape. A place that multiplies its impact through people who leave with new skills, through seeds and seedlings that take root elsewhere, through communities that no longer have to start from scratch.
At the heart of this is our Training Centre and Nursery, currently taking shape alongside everything else at Avara. We are laying the groundwork - exploring a range of systems, crops, and practices - to create for something that has the potential to transform both landscapes and livelihoods at scale. The land itself is both teacher and classroom. What we learn here, we will share.
Read more about the forest and our training centre →
Meet the Founders
Hi, we’re Hanjo & Loree.
In 2022, we moved onto an abandoned piece of land by the Okavango River and began building from the ground up — quite literally. Two crumbling ruins, overgrown fields, and not much else expect wild nature. We started in a tent, cooked on a fire, washed in the river, and grew slowly from there, with endless visions and perseverance to make our dream a reality.
What exists at Avara today was built intentionally, with a lot of learning, a lot of challenges, and an unshakeable belief that this dream we have is possible.
After working in agriculture across different parts of the world and witnessing the damage of industrial food systems firsthand — depleted soils, communities cut off from their own food supply, knowledge systems replaced by dependency on external inputs — we came back asking a simple but difficult question:
What does it look like to truly thrive with nature, not against it?
Avara emerged as a response to live that question out loud.
To follow the full story and ongoing journey, find us on Instagram and Facebook @avaraforestfarm.