How to grow $25K into community-led conservation: Interview with Tanzania’s Mwambao

UNGUJA, Tanzania — Decades before they would partner to build a marine conservation organization together, Ali Thani and Lorna Slade crossed paths in Tanzania. Years later, Slade returned to the East African country researching tourism for her master’s degree when she became involved in an initiative aimed at strengthening the knowledge and rights of local resource stewards. Then came the 2008 global financial crisis. The organization backing the initiative withdrew from Tanzania, providing only a fraction of the funds it had earlier promised — $25,000 — and an idea worth pursuing. “So they said, ‘OK, well, it’s a good idea. We have $25,000, so here you are,’” Slade recalls. That modest beginning would eventually become the Mwambao Coastal Community Network, a locally rooted organization now working with coastal communities across Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania, with an annual budget of around $3.5 million. For Thani, a coastal Tanzanian who had worked in government and with larger conservation organizations, Mwambao grew from a conviction that conservation could not simply be designed elsewhere and brought to communities. People who depend on natural resources, he says, should have the knowledge, capacity, and authority to help manage them. That idea has wider resonance as countries pursue the global goal of conserving 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. Local organizations and communities are expected to shoulder much of that work, even as many struggle to secure the long-term funding available to larger international organizations and intermediaries. Mwambao’s work includes supporting community fisheries management,…This article was originally published on

Mongabay