- Conservation NGO Wetlands International had lofty ambitions when it rolled out its Source to Sea project in East Africa in 2021, covering the Rift Valley wetlands and the Indian Ocean mangroves.
- Difficulties that arose included underestimating the time needed to get government agencies, civil society and community groups on board, overambitious planning, and communication barriers with locals.
- They quickly realized that residents’ urgent livelihood needs needed to be acknowledged and addressed before more abstract concepts such as wetland conservation and integrated catchment management could be introduced.
- Today, the project has made essential contributions to the lives of participating communities and the catchment’s health, created awareness of mangroves and wetlands among the different groups involved, and helped influence policies on water resource management.
Three years into an ambitious wetland restoration project in East Africa, conservationist Julie Mulonga says she’s learned the value of small steps. The Source to Sea project set out to protect wetlands in the Rift Valley and mangroves along the Indian Ocean coastline at the same time as strengthening livelihoods and climate resilience.
“We started with a big vision for the Source to Sea project,” says Mulonga, the East Africa director for Wetlands International, “but looking back, I think we might have aimed too big, too soon.”
Launched in 2021, the project covers two vast ecoregions: the Rift Valley Lakes ecoregion, stretching from Lake Albert and the Ethiopian Highlands in the north, to Lake Tanganyika in the south; and the East African Mangrove ecoregion, extending from southern Somalia to Mozambique, including the Lamu seascape in Kenya, the Rufiji Delta in Tanzania, and the Zambezi River Delta in Mozambique.
The key project sites are in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. These include biodiversity hotspots like Ethiopia’s Abijata-Shalla Lakes National Park, a critical stopover for migratory birds and a designated important bird area, and Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake. The Ziway Shalla and Omo-Turkana river basins where these sites are found have been severely degraded by a combination of deforestation, pollution, overexploitation of water and rangeland, and the growing impacts of climate change. This has resulted in water shortages and food insecurity for many of the millions of people who live in the region.
The project is implemented by Wetlands International, an NGO dedicated to conserving and restoring one of the most endangered freshwater habitat types. More than half of all wetlands globally have been lost since 1900 to agricultural expansion, natural resource extraction and urbanization.
The problem, says Mulonga, lies with the implementation of laws and policies. While governments have made commitments to things like the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which calls for the restoration of 30% of degraded inland water ecosystems and protection of 30% of inland water areas, these haven’t translated into sufficient action at the country level, she says.
Source to Sea represents a new approach for this region.
Mulonga says WI realized they had to work at a landscape scale. “It’s a different way of thinking for us,” she says. “We can no longer work on small sites. We need to look at what is happening upstream and downstream, and engage with all the actors within that landscape.”
The approach isn’t a new concept. Also referred to as integrated water resources management, this landscape-wide focus is transforming the organization’s strategy and workforce. To its existing strengths in assessing, managing and restoring wetland ecologies, WI is building up new capacity to understand and engage with the needs of communities and livelihoods.
The project initially didn’t go to plan. Assessing its own work in late 2021, WI noted difficulties, including underestimating the time needed to get government agencies, civil society and community groups on board, overambitious planning, and communication barriers with local community groups.
Mulonga says they soon learned to put the larger vision aside until they had gained people’s trust and addressed their immediate needs.
One example is a project site in Kenya’s hot and arid Turkana county. Home to several pastoral communities, the county has been ravaged by extended drought since 2018. When Wetlands International approached the Turkana Pastoralist Development Organization (TUPADO) to become a partner for Source to Sea, TUPADO’s programs coordinator, Mohammed Ahmed Yussuf, says they took the WI team to visit the communities.
Yussuf says this is the first step his organization takes with all potential partners, to allow members of communities input in the project activities.
Because many residents of these communities face poverty, Mulonga says, the Wetlands International team quickly realized that residents’ urgent livelihood needs must be acknowledged and addressed before more abstract concepts such as wetland conservation and integrated catchment management can be introduced.
In Naipa, a village on the Turkwel River in the central part of the county, people wanted help to expand and improve their farming operations for greater resilience against floods and droughts, Yussuf explains. In the Lake Turkana fishing villages of Lokipetot and Todonyang, residents said they wanted racks so they could better preserve their catch. Herders in Kapua wanted help rehabilitating rangelands to ensure pasture for their livestock, especially in the dry seasons.
They learned, Mulonga says, to keep the bigger picture in mind but address the communities’ immediate needs first.
Three years on, Yussuf says the Source to Sea activities have made essential contributions to the lives of participating communities and the catchment’s health. The Kapua herders have pasture for their livestock, for example, and schoolchildren at Naipa now have greens to eat from the expanded and improved farming operations, reducing malnutrition in the area.
Interventions like these, in turn, reduce pressure on the natural resources that the people depend on, such as fisheries and freshwater, and protect the resources through, for example, reducing soil erosion. These contribute to the overall health of the catchment.
Yussuf says they implemented and addressed what the communities wanted, stressing that community members often understand how to conserve this area. And now, he says, TUPADO wants to expand the work to the larger catchment to, for example, investigate how activities upstream along the Omo River impact water quality in Lake Turkana. They also want to better align their activities with neighboring Ethiopia and other countries participating in the project.
There have been more highlights. Creating awareness of mangroves and wetlands among the different groups involved has been one great achievement, Mulonga says. A second is finding opportunities for Wetlands International to influence policies affecting the management of water resources, for example, by assisting the Tanzania Forest Service Agency with developing a mangrove management plan in the Rufiji Delta.
The Source to Sea project is slated to run through the end of 2024, but Mulonga says it will continue if funding can be secured.
The headline vision to restore high-value wetlands in the Rift Valley and along the East Africa mangrove coast remains, she says, and adds she’s content with the milestones that have been reached along the way. “Keep the bigger vision in mind,” she says. “Just move step by step, and eventually, you will get to it.”
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Banner Image: Lake Turkana. Image by Aocrane via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
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