From April 23 to May 3, 2025, the Hifadhi Blu Programme hosted its inaugural Collaborative Design Workshops, gathering grantees from across the Western Indian Ocean. Management teams from Kenya, Seychelles, South Africa, and Comoros convened to refine strategies for enhancing Marine Protected Area (MPA) management. Utilizing systems thinking and stakeholder-led design, each site developed customized approaches to ensure long-term conservation impact.
Facilitated by Advanced Conservation Strategies and supported by WIOMSA, the workshops enabled grantees to collaboratively create clear project visions, identify high-leverage interventions, establish monitoring frameworks, and develop site-level capacity needs plans.
In Mombasa, the Kenya Wildlife Service team focused on an inclusive, phased MPA planning process, building on Kenya’s Protected Areas Planning Framework, while addressing information gaps and integrating financial sustainability. The Seychelles Parks and Gardens team employed systems tools to improve enforcement and monitoring, emphasizing the importance of integrated data use and regional institutional learning. WILDTRUST and its partners explored ways to strengthen the co-management model of Mitsamiouli–Ndroudé MPA in Comoros, highlighting the crucial role of community engagement in effective governance. In South Africa’s Addo MPA, South African National Parks developed a strategy to combat illegal resource use by integrating enforcement technology, SCUBA-based ecological monitoring, ranger training, and community outreach.
These workshops marked a significant step from project conception to implementation. They laid the groundwork for site-specific plans, reinforced ownership among MPA teams, and clarified next steps for adaptive management. The lessons learned from this first cohort will inform future phases, ensuring that every intervention is locally grounded, systems-informed, and focused on measurable improvements in MPA effectiveness.