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Mangroves are the only trees on earth built to live between land and sea. At Kenya's coast the foundation backs Stand Up Shout Out's Adopt A Creek programme, which has put tens of thousands of them back into the mud.
02About this project
Mangroves grow where the tide meets the shore, rooted in salt and mud, and they hold the coast together: they break the force of waves before those waves reach a village, they trap the sediment that would otherwise wash the shoreline away, they store several times more carbon than most forests on land, and their tangled roots are the nursery for much of the fish the coast lives on. Kenya has been losing them.
The planting is run by Stand Up Shout Out, the youth organisation the foundation has worked alongside since the beginning, through its Adopt A Creek programme, and the foundation supports it. The work is concentrated in the creeks around Mombasa, at Jomvu Kuu and Tudor Creek, where more than ten thousand mangrove seedlings have been planted since 2021, chiefly Rhizophora mucronata and Avicennia marina, the species that do best in those waters. The Jomvu Kuu work is a partnership with the Bidii Creek Community Conservation group.
Planting is only half of it; the seedlings have to be raised first. The programme runs coastal nurseries. Five thousand mangroves were nursed at Jomvu Kuu and Tudor Creek, one nursery has grown to more than ten thousand seedlings, and the work has spread along the coastline from Kwale to Kilifi. On Wasini Island on the south coast it was extended with Shimoni Turtle Watch and the Wasini Women Group, who set up a village nursery of just over a thousand Ceriops tagal seedlings.
What makes it hold is who does it. The nurseries belong to the women’s groups and community conservation groups that run them, and the young people who plant the seedlings are from the villages the mangroves protect. The conservation work improves their livelihoods, and the hands in the mud belong to people from this coast.