The ocean's best guardians are the coastal communities

Whenever I stand at the edge of the Indian Ocean — at Vanga, at Shimoni, at Lamu, at any of the villages along Kenya’s 536 kilometres of coastline — I am reminded of something the late Prof Wangari Maathai understood deeply about forests: that people who depend on something for their lives understand it far better than people who only study it. She was right about forests. I believe the same truth holds at sea. The fishermen at Watamu who know the reef by name, who can read the colour of water the way others read weather forecasts —this is knowledge that took generations to build. It does not appear in policy briefs.

Next week, Mombasa hosts the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Those of us who work with coastal communities on this continent know that this is not an ordinary conferencing circuit occasion. It carries a pressing question: will the people who have managed these waters for centuries be at the table as decision-makers, or will they again be brought in at the end to validate decisions already made? We have been here before. We know how this usually goes.

Last September, this same city hosted the 13th WIOMSA Scientific Symposium — attracting nearly 1,300 scientists, practitioners, and community leaders from 43 countries, many of whom will be at OOC11. And something happened that you rarely see on such platforms. A coalition of 13 local organisations led the Community Marine Leaders Hub, a special session where fishers, seaweed farmers and elders took the stage alongside scientists, shaping the conversation themselves instead of being spoken about. WIOMSA successfully elevated communities as stewards of sustainability — not as a platitude, but as one of the three organising pillars of the entire conference, alongside science and policy. Will we see the same kind of recognition at OOC11?

Study after study, from seagrass restoration in Madagascar to reef management in Mozambique, showed the same pattern: where communities have genuine authority over their marine resources — legal tenure, governance structures, a real stake in the outcome — the ecosystems hold. Where that authority is absent, even the best-funded interventions eventually falter. The science reinforces a truth known for decades by coastal communities: community-governed marine spaces are not an experiment. They are the most reliable tool we have. The question now is whether OOC11 will follow where science leads.

Lessons from the land. We have seen what happens when communities do have real authority. In Kenya's Greater Rift Valley, WRI’s Restore Local initiative has spent the past three years working directly with community organisations, farmers’ groups, and small enterprises to restore degraded landscapes. Since 2023, these community champions have planted over 21 million trees, restored more than 50,000 hectares of degraded land, and created over 62,000 jobs.

Researchers consistently find that locally led restoration projects are six to twenty times

more likely to succeed over the long term than projects managed by external agencies. Not because communities are noble but because they are accountable — to the land, to each other, and to the generations that come after them. The sea is governed by exactly the same logic.

What is already working on Kenya’s coast , In Kwale and Kilifi Counties, COMRED — Coastal and Marine Resources Development —

has been doing this work since 2006. Their model inverts the usual approach. Instead of

bringing conservation plans to communities and asking for cooperation, COMRED helps

fishing communities build their own plans and backs them with capital. Savings groups

receive modest seed funding through an Eco-Credit Fund and, in return, develop their own marine conservation commitments: mangrove planting, reef monitoring, and regulated fishing pressure. By 2025, 36 such groups were active across the two counties, with over 950 members managing more than 126,000 hectares of coastal seascape. The fish stocks respond. So do the families.

Across the border in Tanzania, Mwambao Coastal Community Network employs a similar approach, and the results are clear. The mangroves are thriving. So are the communities.

These are not isolated success stories. They are proof of a model — one that African

conservation practitioners themselves formalised in the Naivasha Vision of 2023, a

declaration that states plainly: communities are not beneficiaries of conservation. They are its primary investors and its most essential actors. Treating them as anything less is not just a political failure. It is a conservation failure.

What must OOC11 do differently?

Let me be concrete, because this conference will produce commitments, and commitments need to be specific to mean anything.

Money must reach community organisations directly. The current system — where funding flows from governments and foundations through large international NGOs before eventually trickling down to the organisations actually working with fishing communities — is wasteful, slow, and corrosive of local ownership. COMRED, Mwambao, and their peers should be able to access conservation finance on their own terms. The infrastructure for this exists. What is required is the political decision to use it.

Governance rights must be real. A community that monitors a reef but has no legal authority over who fishes it is doing unpaid labour for others. Legal tenure over fishing territories and locally managed marine areas is not a reward for good behaviour. It is the prerequisite for any governance arrangement that will actually hold.

And the voices at this conference must match the work. There are extraordinary

organisations — Kenyan, Comorian, Tanzanian, Mozambican, Malagasy — whose

practitioners understand these waters more deeply than anyone who will fly in for the

conference week. They should be drafting the commitments, not reviewing them after the fact.

Wangari Maathai planted trees because she believed that restoring the land was restoring the dignity of the people who lived on it. That conviction has guided the work of those of us who draw from her legacy — in different landscapes, through different organisations, but from the same root. She was right about forests. The same truth holds here. The ocean has never needed saving from the communities that have lived beside it. What it needs to be saved from are the systems that have slowly stripped those communities of the authority to protect it.

Kenya is hosting this conference. It is an opportunity — perhaps a rare one — to insist that the world’s conversation about ocean conservation be shaped by the people who know it best, who depend on it most, and who have, quietly and without much recognition, kept it going. I close with another wise saying: Bahari itatufikisha popote. The ocean leads us anywhere. Let us choose where it leads.

Njenga Kahiro is Chief Operations Officer at Maliasili, an organisation that supports community-based conservation organisations across Africa. @njengakahiro