The effective thermal conductivity of unsaturated porous media is of interest in a number of applications of heat transfer. In this paper, a novel fractal solution for effective thermal conductivity is derived based on the fractal distribution of surface roughness and pore size in unsaturated porous media with roughened surfaces. The proposed fractal model explicitly relates the effective thermal conductivity to the microstructural parameters (relative roughness, porosity and fractal dimensions). The proposed fractal model is verified by a satisfying agreement of the effective thermal conductivity predicted by our model and that reported as existing experimental data in the literature. A parametric study is also elaborated to investigate the influences of the microstructural parameters on the effective thermal conductivity. The results demonstrate that our proposed fractal model improves our understanding of the physical mechanisms of heat transport through unsaturated porous media with roughened surfaces. One advantage of our fractal analytical model is that it contains no empirical constant, while it is usually required in previous models.