We’ve grown quickly, and in 2026 we were named in the Sunday Times 100. Growth like that comes with a responsibility to do our bit. We’ve always been big on treating people right, and this felt like a natural next step: a way for every deal we arrange to help someone else too.

Our trees are planted in the Vohidahy valley in central-east Madagascar, through a project run by the Italian non-profit Tsiryparma.

This isn’t somewhere you stumble across. Reaching the valley means an 18-kilometre motorbike ride along a dirt track, and life there runs to the rhythm of the rainy season and the harvest. The commune sits around 1,000 metres up, on the edge of Fandriana-Marolambo National Park, and is known locally for its waterfalls, rock pools, caves and the source of the Mananjary River.

Above all, it’s home to a rare surviving block of natural highland forest. Madagascar is often called the eighth continent: it holds more than 200,000 species, and around 70 percent of them are found nowhere else on Earth. In Vohidahy’s forest you’ll find lemurs in the canopy, Madagascar rosewood, and tsiperyfery, a wild pepper that grows only on the island and has found its way into European kitchens.

The forest belongs to the people who live beside it. Two local community groups hold the rights to manage it, handed over by the Malagasy government in 2003 and 2006, and around 11,000 people across eight villages have chosen to keep it standing.

“Our customers trust us with something important, and that trust is why we’ve grown. We wanted that growth to count for something beyond our own business. Knowing that every deal plants a tree, and supports a community working hard to protect its forest, is something the whole team can be proud of.”

Alex Hurst, Joint Managing Director, Jigsaw Finance

Much of Madagascar’s forest has already been lost, and in Vohidahy the pressures are easy to see. Burn scars mark where a family has cleared a patch with fire to plant rice, a practice known locally as tavy. After a few years the soil is exhausted and the farming moves on to the next patch.

Dark stumps show where rosewood has been felled illegally for timber markets in the cities. Hidden stills turn sugarcane into toaka gasy, a local rum, and sugarcane is the best-paying cash crop in the region, so it keeps creating demand for cleared land. Lemurs are still hunted for meat.

Every one of these is illegal, and every one pays better than the alternatives. That’s the real challenge, and it’s why the project focuses as much on people’s livelihoods as it does on trees.

This isn’t a project managed from an office on another continent. It’s led on the ground by Nicola Gandolfi, an Italian forester who researched Madagascar rosewood in Vohidahy for his university thesis in 2005 and 2006, and has worked in Madagascar ever since. He co-founded Tsiryparma in 2011 to carry on that work, and today lives in Madagascar full-time with his family.

He works alongside a small team of local technicians and, crucially, the villagers themselves. Twenty-two residents, two from each village plus six team leaders, make up the forest guardians. Every month they spend around five days walking the forest, recording illegal logging and burning, and talking to their neighbours about why the forest is worth more standing. Twice a year, agents from the regional forestry office join them for longer eight-day missions. Between them, they look after more than 8,000 hectares.

The project’s reach goes beyond the forest, too. The village hospital was rebuilt and reopened in 2022, so the area’s 11,000 residents no longer have to travel to the nearest town for care. Tsiryparma also runs three nursery schools, and a sponsorship programme covers school costs for 22 children.

Every tree starts life in a local nursery. Tsiryparma runs around 40 of them across Vohidahy and the surrounding countryside, and since 2018 they’ve raised more than 80,000 seedlings, around 80 percent of them grown in its own nurseries rather than bought in.

The Vohidahy nursery was set up in 2008 with one main goal: growing more Madagascar rosewood, the precious native tree most at risk from illegal logging. Today the network grows more than 20 species. Some, like acacia, help improve tired soil. Others, like mango, citrus, avocado, baobab and moringa, are planted on farmers’ land, so the trees benefit the families who look after them as well as greening the valley.

For us, this is about doing our bit as a business. Our support helps fund the people who raise the seedlings, plant them and look after them as they grow, creating paid work for local farmers.

It also means that when you arrange your car, van or bike finance through Jigsaw, you’re giving something back too. There’s nothing extra for you to do. It’s simply part of how we do business.