Sixty million people live on the coast of the Western Indian Ocean. Their livelihoods, their food security, their cultural identity, and their economic futures are inseparably tied to a marine system that contains 38% of the world's coral reef species and some of the most productive small-scale fisheries on earth.
Almost none of them appear in the stories told about it.
I have spent years working at the intersection of conservation communications, monitoring and evaluation, and documentary filmmaking along the East African coast. And the pattern I see consistently, across funders, across organisations, across media platforms, is a storytelling infrastructure that is structurally misaligned with the conservation challenge it is supposed to serve.
We are producing content for the wrong audiences, in the wrong languages, through the wrong channels, told by people who are not from the places the stories are about. And we are doing it at precisely the moment when the Western Indian Ocean's marine ecosystems, and the communities that depend on them, can least afford the cost of that misalignment.
The Gap Is Not About Volume. It Is About Architecture.
The conservation sector is not short of content. NGO annual reports, impact films, donor communications, awareness campaigns: the volume of material produced about ocean conservation in the WIO is substantial. The problem is not that the stories are not being told. The problem is the architecture of who tells them, who they are told to, and what they are designed to do.
At the 2022 Wildscreen natural history festival (the field's most prestigious gathering), over 25% of submitted films featured African wildlife and marine environments. Only 7% were made by Africans. The production infrastructure, the commissioning decisions, the editorial authority, and the financial returns from stories about African conservation landscapes sit almost entirely outside Africa.
This is not a diversity and inclusion argument, though it is that too. It is a strategic communications argument. When the people who know a place best (who speak its languages, understand its governance structures, have relationships with its communities, and have watched its ecosystems change over decades) are systematically excluded from the production of stories about it, the stories are less accurate, less nuanced, and less useful. They tell audiences what conservation looks like from the outside. They cannot tell them what it feels like, costs, and requires from the inside.
And it is the inside story (the governance meeting, the household income calculation, the community debate about a closed reef) that actually drives conservation outcomes.
What Monitoring and Evaluation Tells Us That Communications Ignores
My background is not only in filmmaking. I have worked around communications strategies and MEL (monitoring, evaluation, and learning), and what that experience has taught me is that the conservation sector has a deeply embedded blind spot when it comes to storytelling impact.
We measure ecological outcomes. We measure financial returns on conservation investment. We produce theory of change frameworks that trace the pathway from intervention to outcome with impressive methodological rigour.
And then we commission a film, screen it at a donor conference, and call it communications.
The evidence base for what conservation storytelling actually does (how it changes attitudes, shifts governance decisions, modifies fishing behaviour, builds or erodes community trust in conservation institutions) is almost non-existent. The most rigorous study in the field, a randomised controlled trial of the Blue Planet II effect, found that while the documentary significantly increased environmental knowledge, it did not translate into measurable individual behaviour change in a controlled experiment.
That finding does not mean storytelling does not work. It means we are not asking the right questions about how it works, for whom, in what context, and through what channels. A community screening of a Swahili-language film about reef closure outcomes, in a village where the governance committee is actively debating whether to extend a closure, operates through completely different mechanisms than a BBC documentary broadcast to global audiences. We need to understand and measure those mechanisms. Currently, almost no one does.
This is the gap I am most interested in closing. Not just producing better stories, but building the evidence base for what better stories actually do.
The Western Indian Ocean Has Something Most Regions Do Not
Here is what I think the WIO conservation storytelling field consistently undersells: this region has an extraordinary asset that most conservation contexts lack.
Across the WIO, from Kenya's Beach Management Units to Madagascar's 219+ Locally Managed Marine Areas to the emerging co-management frameworks along the Mozambique Channel, there are hundreds of functioning community governance structures making real decisions about marine resources every day. Village committees enforcing fishing closures. Community groups restoring reef habitats. Women's associations tracking market prices through closure cycles. Citizen scientists monitoring fish stocks on reefs their families have fished for generations.
These structures are not waiting for conservation to arrive. They are conservation. They are doing the governance work, the negotiation work, the enforcement work, the ecological monitoring work that external programmes spend millions of dollars trying to build from scratch in other contexts.
And almost none of it is documented in a form that reaches the audiences (funders, policymakers, regional conservation bodies) who need to understand it to make better decisions.
The stories exist. The governance capacity exists. The ecological knowledge exists. What is missing is the storytelling infrastructure to connect them to the audiences that matter.
What I Am Building Toward: A Case Study From Southern Tanzania
Let me be specific about what this looks like in practice, because thought leadership that stays at the level of diagnosis without getting to the level of solution is its own form of the problem.
In the Kilwa Seascape of southern Tanzania, the communities of the SOMAKI Collaborative Fisheries Management Area (CFMA), eight Beach Management Units covering villages from Songomnara to Kipakoni, have built one of the most sophisticated examples of community-led marine governance on the East African mainland coast. They have established temporary octopus fishing closures, locally agreed and locally enforced, that allow fish stocks to recover before harvest. They have deployed community groups to restore degraded coral reefs using transplant frames at sites in Masongoro, Kifinge, and Kipakoni. They have built governance structures that sit at the intersection of ecological stewardship, livelihood management, and institutional accountability in ways that formal conservation frameworks often fail to achieve.
This is the story I am currently working to tell through a short documentary film that follows a complete octopus closure cycle: from the governance meeting that sets the closure through the household income pressures that test it to the morning it lifts and the first boats return to a reef that has been given time to recover.
The film is built not around conservation success, but around conservation reality. The governance debates. The households whose income falls during the closed season. The climate pressures that undercut community effort. The question of whether local institutions can hold under the weight of poverty, outside fishing pressure, and ecological uncertainty.
That is the story the WIO conservation field needs told. Not because it is inspiring, though it is, but because it is true. And because the funders, policymakers, and regional institutions who need to understand community-led marine governance in the WIO cannot make good decisions without it.
The Communications Strategy That Actually Works
Twenty-plus years in strategic communications has taught me one thing above all: the most effective conservation storytelling is not the most polished. It is the most precisely targeted.
The Bahari Yetu film in Kenya's Lamu Archipelago, a modest Swahili-language production screened to Beach Management Units and the county government, led directly to a unanimous vote to establish a marine protected area. Blue Ventures' community-to-community oral storytelling about octopus closure results in Madagascar replicated a conservation model across thousands of kilometres of coastline without a single international broadcast.
These are not stories that won awards at Wildscreen. They are stories that changed governance decisions because they were told to the right people, in the right language, at the right moment in a decision-making process.
That is the communications architecture the WIO needs more of: locally produced, locally narrated, strategically timed to governance windows, measured for actual impact rather than reach and impressions. And it needs to be built by people who understand the communities well enough to know when the governance window is open: people who are in the room when the reef closure is being debated, not arriving afterwards to document the result.
The Western Indian Ocean has a story problem. But the stories exist. The storytellers exist. The governance structures and community knowledge and ecological change that make for compelling, important, consequential narrative are all there, happening every day along thousands of kilometres of coastline.
What has been missing is the will to build a communications infrastructure that centres those stories, measures their impact, and directs them to the audiences and decision-makers who need them most.
That is the work I am committed to.