When Ansumana Darbo thinks about his childhood in the Sankandi village of The Gambia, his mind is filled with playful memories of watching fishermen return from fishing trips along the Bintang Bolong river bank.
The beehive of activities on shorelines would excite him. The fishermen were usually successful, and Darbo would watch carefully how the fishermen sorted out their good catch. He attributed the quality of the seafood to the presence of lush mangroves, a unique ecosystem that serves as essential breeding and nursery grounds for the fish.
“We witnessed an abundance of fish in our rivers because we had mangroves,” Darbo said. This abundance means the local population doesn’t need to buy fish anywhere as the “fishermen distribute fish to the whole community free of charge and even to some neighboring communities,” he adds.
But the supply that fed this distribution chain slowly ended.
“As time went on, that [free distribution] started fading away,” he said, adding that the fish population disappeared as mangroves died. “There used to be extensive mangrove forests but these have been affected by human action,” he told The Xylom.
Since the 1970s, The Gambia has experienced a severe drought that has destroyed 11,000 hectares of mangrove forests and threatened over 627 fish species found in the low-lying West African coastal nation. But in The Gambia, the smallest country in mainland Africa with an 80 km-long coastline, the bigger danger to the mangroves, said agriculture researcher Sidat Yaffa, comes from the unsustainable deforestation of the mangrove trees to meet increasing wood demand for fuel and construction.
These human activities have intensified the environmental pressures on the mangrove ecosystem, leaving them a shell of what they used to be. According to a United Nations report, The Gambia’s mangroves have shrunk at a rate of 1.5% every year since 2008, which means the country has lost more than 20% of its mangrove forest cover to date. Around the banks of the Bintang Bolong, which is one of the poorest regions in the country, 90% of mangrove forests have been lost.
These ecosystems are vital for the fish that survive in the deltaic waters as well as for the communities that depend on them for food and shelter. “Their importance truly lies with how they benefit coastal communities and coastlines, in that they protect coastlines from erosion, and they protect communities, nearby villages from storm activity and from wave energy and also in terms of livelihoods,” said Laura Michie, program manager at United States-based Mangrove Action Project.
Mangroves are coastal trees with long stilt roots that grow in brackish water. These forests provide habitat for 341 threatened species around the world and help prevent coastal erosion, acting as shoreline barriers against storms and floods.
Additionally, mangroves are important nature-based solutions to the global climate crisis. They are major carbon sinks that sequester three to five times more carbon per equivalent area than tropical rainforests.
This means that even though they make up 3% of the earth’s forest cover, they have the potential to contribute to 10% of global carbon emissions if deforested.
Mangroves have several other benefits besides carbon sequestration and providing breeding grounds for fish. “[Mangroves] minimise pollution, it filters water to make what we drink better,” Yaffa said.
Yet, this ecosystem with diverse ecological benefits faces threats worldwide mainly due to unsustainable tree chopping.
Satellite maps from NASA showed that in 2010, mangroves covered more than 130,000 square kilometers of the Earth’s coastlines, or about the same area as Greece. But over the decades, global mangrove extent has significantly decreased. According to the Global Mangrove Watch, over 700,000 mangrove disturbance alerts were recorded between January 2019 and June 2024.
“We have [a] loss of mangroves because of invasive weeds within the mangrove ecosystem, lots of high content salt water which mangroves are not tolerant to, and lots of mangrove harvesting by the local communities for firewood, fencing materials, and roofing materials,” Yaffa said, who is also the director of the WASCAL Doctoral Research Program on Climate Change and Education. “These three compounds [and resulted in] mangrove degradation in The Gambia.”
To restore these essential wetlands in his community, Darbo launched a mangrove restoration and conservation project in 2015 through the Sankandi Youth Development Association, a local nonprofit led by youth and women that he co-founded in 2005 to empower his local community.
Darbo said he was inspired to start the project because of a pilot mangrove restoration program started in 2012 in Kalaji, a village in The Gambia’s west coast, led by local organization Kombo Foni Forestry Association in partnership with the country’s parks and wildlife department.
“When I saw it, I decided to try it in Sankandi,” Darbo said.
The restoration process is fairly long and arduous, typically beginning with an examination of planting sites to ascertain whether the mangrove seedlings will survive. Once this phase is over, the organization buys seedlings from a local company for less than USD 0.10 per seedling and decides on a planting day.
The planting exercise occurs only during the rainy season every year for four years when up to 200,000 red mangrove seedlings are planted along the river banks spaced at one meter each. But while these red mangroves appear easy to grow, Mangrove Action Project’s Michie said that a lot of measures must be taken to guarantee survival.
“Red mangrove is very easy to grow in nurseries,” she said. “So, the first question is whether red mangrove is the right species. The best way to do that is to look around the site and see in the nearby mangroves, what species are living nearby. If it’s not red mangrove, then red mangrove may not be the right choice.”
But if the site is favorable for red mangroves, Michie said, then planters should make sure “the water is flowing in and out and there’s good drainage so that the water drains at the low tide and oxygen can actually get down into the soil.”
Most of the volunteers engaged by the Sankandi Youth Development Association are women.
“Women in The Gambia, especially women with disabilities, face many challenges in accessing available economic opportunities mainly due to land degradation, lower levels of literacy, less access to and control over resources, less access to networks, and greater vulnerability to sexual exploitation and abuse at [the] community level if not the household level,” Darbo said.
Female volunteers like Darboending Darboe leave their houses early every morning and either walk or hitch donkey rides to the planting sites.
“I sort the propagules when they arrive. I help in transporting the mangrove seedlings and also help in the actual planting,” Darboe said, who works alongside 50 other female volunteers. “I feel happy whenever I see my fellow women because the work is done towards the development of the community so I feel glad.”
Darboe understands the crucial role that mangroves play in local environmental, economic, and social conditions, especially for her village which is already experiencing increasing average temperatures due to climate change. “I am an asthmatic patient and during the dry season, the heat affects me and I am constantly admitted into the hospital,” she told The Xylom.
So far, the women of the nonprofit have planted over 700,000 mangrove propagules, Darbo said, and they monitor the growth of the seedlings throughout the year. As part of their monitoring activities, the organization has collaborated with Edinburgh Napier University, during which five graduate students from the university carried out field experiments to evaluate the successes and failures of the organization’s tree planting exercises in the Bintang Bolong estuary and helped them generate baseline data for the project.
Experts argue that successful mangrove projects are largely dependent on the availability of alternative sources of livelihood to dissuade locals from cutting mangrove trees; it is not enough to create policies and generate awareness around the issue.
“If you don’t provide alternatives, then what are people going to do if people’s only option is to chop down the mangroves for fuel wood or for construction?” Michie said. “If you really want to protect and restore mangroves that’s where you have to start.”
One of the main goals of the Sankandi Youth Development Association is to create alternative income and agricultural sources for locals. This has included a beekeeping project which the organization introduced in 2018 to empower youth and women involved in the mangrove restoration project.
“Beekeeping is an environmentally friendly and sustainable development initiative that is modeled with our mangrove conservation and restoration efforts in Kiang West Peninsula to empower women and youth in each community,” Darbo said. “The project targeted 3000 beehives to be distributed in 34 communities in Kiang West Peninsula – including Sankandi – as a business enterprise development to create employment and job opportunities.”
The organization trains women on caring for beehives and producing honey and wax working with the National Beekeepers Association of The Gambia who sometimes buys the honey they produce. More than 20 locals have been trained to care for and harvest from 50 hives in Sankandi.
“I feel happy whenever I see my fellow women because the work is done towards the development of the community so I feel glad.”
The organization also introduced the Mangrove Microfinance Loan Scheme in 2022 to help women who lost their rice fields to saltwater intrusion boost their businesses instead of cutting mangrove trees. This scheme provides 5,000 Gambian dalasis ($73.11) as microloans to women in Sankandi who have been assisting with mangrove planting. The loan is interest-free and beneficiaries are expected to return it in six months’ time.
“I am a mother so I want a better future for my children and other children. That’s why I see the mangrove project as an opportunity to play my part.”
Darboe received the microloan in June 2023 and invested it into her vegetable trading business. “The business is thriving and it has been helping me and my family,” the 44-year-old mother of three said.
Darboe is only one of the 20 beneficiaries. Darboe Adama, 44, said she had often struggled with her bread and sandwich business, but that changed when she received the loan in July 2023.
“I used the money to procure wholesale materials. Previously, daily profits were invested back into the business. But once I accessed the loan, I bought wholesale and I am able to save my profits,” the mother of nine said.
For Darboe, the benefits and the economic opportunities mangroves offer to local communities have encouraged her to stay committed to the project.
“I have seen the process and the potential and benefit of mangrove restoration. I am a mother so I want a better future for my children and other children,” she said. “That’s why I see the mangrove project as an opportunity to play my part. I encourage other women to participate in the project as it is not only relevant to the development of Sankandi but also the country.”
However, 80% of global mangrove projects fail due to ineffective planning. “Lots of people see mangrove restoration as mangrove planting. But the actual restoration needs to be much more than just planting trees because mangroves live in such a challenging environment, right at that interface between land and sea,” Michie said.
But projects like Sankandi Youth Development Association’s mangrove initiative go beyond planting more trees, which makes it more successful. Darbo said the organization’s initiatives including the restoration project, would not have been possible without funding from international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme, Global Environment Facility, the U.S. Embassy in The Gambia, Jonas Philanthropies, Yves Rocher Foundation, Association of Coastal Ecosystem Services, as well as a $5,000 grant from the environmental organization Earthwatch Institute in 2018.
However, sustaining the organization’s projects and expanding its drive requires more funding. “We need finances to get more seedlings in order to plant more and expand beekeeping projects and establish more beehives,” Darbo said.
“The community is looking at us.”
