Restore Landscapes.
Improve Health.

Yes. Fractile Institute, Inc. is a North Carolina nonprofit corporation recognized as tax exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, EIN 39-2409154. Contributions are tax deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law.

Our financials are filed publicly with the IRS each year. If you want to understand how a donation moves from your hands to a tree in the ground, write to us and we will walk you through it.

It is a relationship we manage openly rather than hide. Coffee is sold through Fractile Labs, a separate for-profit public benefit corporation. Our founder holds an ownership stake in Labs and serves as its CEO, and he recuses himself from any Institute board vote involving transactions between the two entities.

Donations and programme work run through the Institute. Coffee commerce runs through Labs. The two are never commingled in banking or accounting, and the relationship is disclosed on our annual filing with the IRS.

Partly, and we are careful about the difference. That clearing forest leaves water standing, and that standing water breeds the mosquitoes carrying malaria, is well documented. Whether restoring forest cover on smallholder land measurably reduces transmission, at what scale and over what timeframe, is far less settled.

That open question is what our research is built to test, which is why we call it proposed research rather than proven results. If the hypothesis does not hold, the wells still deliver clean water, the wages are still roughly double the local rate, and the trees still hold soil and produce a harvest.

Every field expense is documented against a receipt and reconciled monthly. Planting is recorded as it happens, with geotagged and timestamped entries rather than a summary written at the end of a season. Water quality is measured at the source rather than reported second hand.

Where a partner cannot produce that documentation, we stop funding that line. We have ended a partnership over exactly this. We would rather lose a programme than publish numbers we cannot stand behind.

Both sites sit where deforestation, malaria, and unsafe water overlap. In Madagascar we work near the Manombo Special Reserve in the Farafangana district, beside remnant forest that matters for native species recovery. In Uganda we work in Nebbi District, in the West Nile region.

Working in two countries is deliberate. A result that holds in one place and not the other tells us something a single site never could, and it keeps us from mistaking a local accident for a general finding.

This is the honest failure mode of most planting projects, and it is the risk we designed around. Trees that nobody has a reason to keep alive rarely survive their first dry season after the money leaves.

Our answer is that the trees are worth more standing than cleared to the households tending them. They produce a saleable harvest, the people caring for them earn roughly double the local rate, and coffee revenue funds the next planting season rather than the next grant cycle.