Spotlight On: Mnemba Island

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This small Zanzibar island is home to a huge coral reef restoration project

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The survival of coral reef is not just vital to marine life, but to humanity. Here’s how one conservation project off the coast of Zanzibar is fighting for the ocean’s future.

Restoring Coral Reefs On Mnemba Island

It’s just turned 7pm on 10 January 2025. The waxing gibbous moon looms high in the sky, so bright as if it were a giant halo illuminating the night sky. Both Venus and Mars have risen, and between the hum of the current and the whispers of the sands, shooting stars blind the night sky in Jupiter’s giant shadow.

Yes. Life on Mnemba Island is, in a word or two, galactically paradisal. It’s these rare and private moments of interstellar solace that make this natural coral dune rising from the depths of the Indian ocean such a gem on the increasingly crowded and dusty Zanzibar coastline.

Remote (aside from a view of civilisation over the water), wild and stealthy, Mnemba Island is a vision of indulgence of the Seychellean variety. The water here is a blue seldom seen in other parts of the world, and the sand so granular it feels like walking on some kind of earthy sponge fluff. The further out on the island you go, the more beautiful it gets. The sand gets whiter and the shores more crystalline, so dazzling it’s difficult to see. Plumes of water gather, crisscrossing the reefs in an almost matrimonial affair consummated by flocks of curlew sandpipers and crab plovers. Naturally, it’s a magnet for all kinds of wildlife, from bottlenose dolphins to nesting green sea turtles, and on land, a small group of Ader’s duiker, a critically endangered antelope, and Africa’s rarest.

It’s this grand, off-the-radar Crusoe-esque adventure of a marine destination that first attracted safari operator &Beyond to this stretch of sandy luxe when they scored the lease from the Zanzibar government back in 1997. Enigmatic and soulful, the natural charm of Mnemba Island is enough to put anyone under Tanzania’s utterly quixotic spell.

A family banda at Mnemba Island Lodge

While it’s all immaculate and pruned to perfection, getting it into shape was no easy task, admits Jonathan Braack, andBeyonds’ group sustainability manager. ‘We spent two years getting people on board – from community leaders to members of government and fishermen – telling them what the situation was and how it would affect them if action to protect the reefs wasn’t immediate,’ Jonathan says. ‘I was personally going out, wooing them. I presented them with a revenue-based model that was effective in all areas of conservation, the economy and community.’

Over the years, Jonathan’s gamble paid off: from July 2023 to July 2024 alone, revenue from the house reef alone grew from 305 million dollars to 1.7 billion as a result of community-based engagement projects.

Though there have been many political challenges over the years, the fruits of the brand’s labour are increasingly paying off thanks to its continued efforts in positive impact first tourism models and their ongoing collaboration with NGO Wild Impact (formerly the African Foundation). The mantra is and has always been geared to ‘conservation right on your step’, and to help nurture this they have several guardians working hard to preserve the beauty and ecological richness of African waters, especially in Mnemba.

Their latest project is overseen by marine biologist Camilla Flores who, with a team of local experts, has devised a programme of coral reef restoration projects to kickstart life into Mnemba’s surrounding reefs, many of which guests can partake in via bespoke or set itineraries. She works in situ with the lodge and brand reporting on, developing, safeguarding and implementing several conservation projects to help track key species of coral and turtle species, and to understand the very human effect on ocean ecosystems on the east African coastline. Beyond that, the primary focus of Camilla’s work is to expand on the success of the NGO’s involvement in helping the Zanzibar government to create the main island’s first marine protected zone in 2002, and in 2023 around Mnemba Island. Since the inception of these marine protected zones, Camilla has strengthened the efforts of Jonathan’s eco-tourism model by actively working with local communities to encourage them to help protect the reefs, not just for the tourism dollars, but to also sustain their own growing economy by virtue of a healthy sea.

The bespoke program is the latest in the brand’s positive impact-led programmes aimed to educate guests on the importance of marine conversation in Africa and beyond. Over the years, Camilla’s team has scoured the island’s surrounding reefs to identify which parts of the marine ecosystem are most vulnerable; many have been wiped out in Zanzibar as a result of global warming and increased overtourism. In response, several star and turtle shaped cages filled with rocks have been erected, which tropical fish from Nemo to Dory are populating and regenerating.

One of the underwater cages. (© Wild Impact)

Every guest, regardless of whether they take part in one of the island’s positive impact based itineraries or not, pays $100 per night towards local conservation and community projects, from conservation lessons in schools to rebuilding clinics and hospitals on the Tanzanian mainland. It’s this brand of feel good tourism that not only attracts guests to the lodge but also encourages them to do more via bespoke and tailored positive impact led itineraries, which Camilla’s team actively designs.

I first see the fruits of Camilla’s work out on a short cruise with her colleague Calvin Williams, the man tasked with the lodge’s island excursions. The cages are a mere five-minute boat ride away, located in a small artificial reef on the southern tip of the island. I, a lowly journalist, admit my fear of being immersed in water, so I watch their efforts in the sea from the safety of the boat (and later a rubber ring that both Calvin and Camilla drag me along in the water). The coral frames teem with life and are a well-cared for spot, enjoying round-the-clock protection from the island’s team of guides and rangers. For brave folk unlike me, the half day interactive experience also lets you dive down into the depths so you can attach your own piece of coral to the frames and take photos to commemorate your contribution and efforts.

Back on land, I quiz Camilla on her motives and the importance of coral reefs back in the Ocean Without Borders’ (OWB) Discovery Centre. ‘I fell in love with the reefs when I was a child,’ she tells me. ‘I spent a lot of time in Mozambique, and from a young age I saw early on just how much people relied on them, and I made a near instant decision that I wanted to dedicate my life to protecting them.’

As a city dweller and someone who remains disconnected from the ocean through fear, I ask her point blank why an urbanite like me should even begin to care about these critically endangered reefs in the first place. Surprised by my bluntness and scepticism, she delivers an impassioned soliloquy. ‘Coral reefs provide a habit to a quarter of the world’s marine species and many of those species are critically important to humans for our own survival,’ Camilla says. ‘As structures, they mostly occur in tropical countries, many of which are developing nations and people rely on them as resources not just for tourism, but also food as the fish who thrive in them are usually their only source of protein. They also provide habitat and shoreline protection for islands like Mnemba, and those islands vice versa also rely on them for their GDP.’

Outside of food and tourism, the reefs, Camilla notes, also provide technological breakthroughs in medicine. ‘More and more pharmaceutical companies are also utilising reefs as a form of drug research for developing new treatments against cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and HIV thanks to the abundance of microbial compounds, toxins and sponges found in these lively marine habitats,’ Camilla says. ‘They are, quite literally, saving lives.’

(Wild Impact)

Science aside, the success of what Camilla and her team has created on Mnemba Island is also thanks to andBeyond’s efforts to educate guests as well as the locals who engage with them during these experiences.

‘It is, and always has been, about community initiatives,’ Camilla says. ‘People who live in Zanzibar look to the ocean for their food and their revenue. We work with them through our eco program, especially in local government, where we are trying to get marine education taught as part of the school curriculum. The model of high revenue and low numbers is a model we also implement, and it is proven to work.’

At one stage, more than 300 boats with thousands of tourists were visiting the reefs. The result? Dead and critically damaged corals, which, according to Camilla, were still visited because tourists thought they were ‘still alive’. To ensure their survival, the team worked with the Zanzibar authorities to identify the most vulnerable reef sites, declaring them special areas and protected marine conservation zones.

‘We worked incredibly closely with the Ministry of the Economy and community chiefs to encourage them to charge people more to see these areas to reduce the impact on the reefs via a new conservation levy,’ Camilla says. ‘The area itself has increased revenue for the government by 500 percent and 30 percent of that money goes directly back into the community.’

As per the latest findings from several global authorities and NGOs, these protected zones couldn’t be more needed. The latest flagship 2024 WWF report revealed a global 74 percent drop in average species population with some of the steepest losses felt on the African continent alone. Habitat loss driven by a global food system is primarily the dominant threat to wildlife populations around the world, with a colossal 56 percent experienced just by marine habitats globally. Coral populations, Camilla admits, are also dwindling as a result of rising sea temperatures, which now are beyond our control. An internationally led report produced by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring network gathered across 12,000 sites in 73 countries also saw that 14 percent of the planet’s reefs were lost between 2009 and 2018. With samples collected by over 300 scientists through two million observations, this roughly equates to around 11,700 square kilometres of coral loss, more than half of what makes up the intricate web of ecosystems of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Mnemba Island Dive Centre

This degradation doesn’t just spell bad news for marine life, but also us. According to several recent scientific studies and papers from around the world, coral reefs are thought to produce around 50 percent of the earth’s oxygen despite only covering a tiny fraction (0.0025 percent) of the ocean floor. This oxygen production predominantly comes from the photosynthetic algae living within the coral, called zooxanthellae, which generate oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. The hotter the oceans become, the more coral bleaching occurs, and with that, the more this symbiotic relationship between life on and off land is threatened. Humans are no exception.

The longer I chat, the more annihilistic I become in my quizzing Camilla. Without any hesitation, I ask her, why bother when the global scientific outlook for the future of our planet is so bleak? She stares at me with a quizzical look, and I can tell almost instantly it’s a question that strikes an emotional nerve. A minute of thought washes over her, and she delivers another impassioned monologue.

‘My love and passion for coral reefs started when I was very young, and I was privileged enough to see beautiful and healthy reefs,’ she says. ‘Now I spend most of my time trying to implement measures to restore reefs that are degraded due to human overexploitation. It can make me sad and angry at times but never once have I ever considered giving up. It motivates me to try harder because we are running out of time. David Attenborough said “what humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet”. The question is not why I do this when the future is bleak. The question is why is humanity not doing everything it can to save our world?’

Heading back to the main island after my four-night jaunt on the island, it’s perhaps Camilla’s final words that hit me the most. ‘Without coral reefs, we die. That is why preserving them is important: not just for marine conservation, but also for the survival of humankind. At the grassroots level, we are trying to teach very young people from the offset that global warming is a problem and it’s that generation that will make the greatest difference now, and in the future.’

And with that, I returned home, not just enlightened but inspired to do more.