Mohamed the Tour Guide
The ocean is a way of life
Mohamed lives in Mkwiro Village on Kenya’s Wasini Island, bordering the biodiversity-rich waters of East Africa's Coral Refuge.
“I was born in Mkwiro, I went to school here, and my entire family still lives here. On this island, we depend on the ocean -- there is no farming here, just fishing,” says Mohamed. “Wasini is a very special place. It’s an island surrounded by seawater, and because of that we have a huge focus on protecting the reef.”
“My entire income is from the ocean. In the off-season I work as a fisherman with my uncle, we drop our traps near the reef in the fishing grounds. We leave them overnight and check back the next day to see what we’ve caught - usually rabbitfish, goatfish, parrotfish, and surgeonfish.”
“My family has been fishing here for generations, and we have seen a big difference in the amount of fish in our waters. Back when my uncle was a young man, they would just fish right by the shore for only a few hours. When I was young, the fishermen would return from fishing and hand out fish to us kids and we would run and fry them. They would give us good fish, like rabbitfish. Now, fishers don’t give away fish -- even the fish that used to be thrown back, we keep. Now, every fish is important.”
“There are many reasons for these changes. According to what I’ve learned, the fishing methods people use now can be very damaging. “
“Carbon emissions and global warming have also caused changes here, and if our marine ecosystems are not conserved, if our mangrove forests are not conserved, if our seagrass is not conserved, we won’t be able to continue here. We have to conserve these ecosystems so that the mangroves can continue to absorb carbon, so that we can continue to fish and to live.”
When he’s not fishing, Mohamed also runs a local ecotourism business with his family, Wasini Rafiki Tours.
“My tourism business is fully local. There is a lot of competition here, many tourism businesses run by big chains and hotels, but we do this work locally -- through connections with friends and social media. I love it when people visit us. I want them to experience our culture, it’s very different from the other cultures in this region, and I want them to experience our nature -- we have so many different species here, it’s beautiful.”
“When our guests arrive, I take them to the marine park to snorkel through the mangroves, and then to Wasini for lunch. The place where I take them to snorkel is a protected area, so there’s a lot of marine life and the corals are very healthy.”
“In the marine park we see big fish and huge schools of fish,” says Mohamed. “When I go fishing outside of the park with traps and lines in the legal fishing grounds, we catch very few fish. I see a big difference between the amount of fish in the marine park and in our fishing grounds.”
In recent years, Mohamed has become a central leader in his community’s efforts to conserve and manage their fishery. He was elected by his neighbors to join the local Beach Management Unit (BMU), a grassroots community organization that safeguards local waters.
“We are the beach managers, so we are concerned with every activity taking place on our beaches. We do conservation, we clean the beaches, we talk to the communities about the importance of marine life to the area. We are building connections between marine life and communities.”
Volunteers in Wasini gather at their local BMU office before heading out on a beach clean-up.
Mohamed is proud of his work leading this group: “WCS has also trained us to do monitoring -- we have a monitoring and surveillance committee that checks to see what kind of fishing methods people are using out there, and what kind of fish they are catching -- we make sure people aren’t catching small fish, or lobsters with eggs, things like that."
“When I first started getting involved with WCS in 2016, they took us to see areas where corals were broken and there were no fish on the reef. What I learned was that if we protect the corals and if the corals are able to grow, in turn many fish will live on the reef because corals are the building blocks for fish.”
“They say that in the near future, if people continue to conserve our protected areas, we will continue to grow new fish breeding areas and can come to a time when we can rely on fishing the way that our uncles and our fathers used to.”
“Change is hard for people -- before the BMU, people fished however they wanted,” Mohamed explains. “But, over time, people are changing and the community wants us here now.”
“When we’re creating a community conserved area, I want people to participate. If we are doing patrols, I want people to help us do patrols. If we are planting mangroves, I want them to help us plant mangroves. There is an understanding now that the world is changing, and the fish are disappearing, and we can all be involved in conserving this place.”
“I’m in love with marine life and with the ocean. The environment lets us live -- when we conserve our ecosystems, we are making it so that future generations can come and see this place and say, our parents and our brothers did this for us. We protect this place so that they will be able to come and see it. These ecosystems are part of our heritage.”
Coral reefs are the most diverse and productive ecosystems in the world’s oceans. They occupy just .1% of the sea, yet are home to 25% of all marine species. East Africa’s coral refuge is a critical source of food and livelihoods for people like Mohamed all across Kenya and Tanzania. Let’s work together to safeguard these globally important reefs for the benefit of communities, the marine ecosystem, and the world: Join us and learn more about WCS’s coral reef conservation work .
Our deepest gratitude to Mohamed for sharing his and his family’s story with us. You can find Wasini Rafiki Tours on social media .
Many thanks to Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Vibrant Oceans Initiative and the Blue Action Fund, whose support has been critical to WCS’s conservation work in the coral refuge.
