The Coastal Conservancies

The Coastal Conservancies project supports a network of seven community-led conservancies stretching from the Lamu Archipelago inland along the Tana River — one of Kenya's most ecologically and economically vital landscapes. It spans marine, coastal, delta, and riverine ecosystems, and the people whose lives are shaped by them: Awer forest communities along the Lamu–Kiunga corridor, Somali pastoralists on the eastern bank of the Tana, and farming and fishing villages through the delta. The project works alongside these communities to protect fisheries, mangroves, coral reefs, forests, and the habitats that sustain both biodiversity and livelihoods.

The landscape holds species and ways of life that exist almost nowhere else. The hirola — the world's most endangered antelope, endemic to this corner of East Africa — clings to existence in the grasslands east of the Tana; it is estimated that fewer than five hundred animals remain in the wild, and many of them are within Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy, where local pastoralists have made their stewardship a matter of inheritance. Further downriver, the Tana red colobus and Tana mangabey — two critically endangered primates found nowhere else on Earth — cling on in a few fragmented forest patches along a sixty-kilometre stretch of the river, at the heart of Ndera Community Conservancy. On Pate Island, women who have fished the reef flats for generations have pioneered Kenya's first community-led octopus closures, closing off their own fishing grounds for months at a time so that stocks can recover — and then sharing in the larger catches that follow. And between Lamu and the Somali border live the Awer, one of Kenya's smallest indigenous communities and traditional hunter-gatherers whose knowledge of the Boni–Dodori forest ecosystem runs generations deep. The Awer Community Conservancy aims to protect both the biodiversity of this landscape and the unique cultural heritage of the Awer people.

The conservancies are backed by a coalition of partners including Basecamp Foundation, Fauna & Flora International, The Nature Conservancy, the Northern Rangelands Trust, and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, alongside WildLandscapes East Africa and Archipelagus. Within this coalition, Archipelagus serves as a continuity funder, stepping in to sustain core operations, governance, and community vigilance when other funding cycles tapered off — so that locally managed marine and terrestrial areas can maintain and build on the gains already made.

By pairing ecosystem-scale conservation science with community leadership and long-term investment, the project secures resilient ecosystems and supports the people who depend on them.