A Year in the Jangamo Bay Hope Spot, Mozambique

March 14, 2022

Featured image by Jeff Hester

By Francesca Trotman, Hope Spot Champion and Founder, Love the Oceans

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It’s been an entire year since the Jangamo Hope Spot was established – how the time has flown! With the pandemic still ongoing, activities in the area haven’t quite returned to “normal” but organization Love The Oceans, the Hope Spot Champions, and their community have been making progress nonetheless.

 

The 2021-2022 turtle nesting season is currently underway in Jangamo Bay. Love The Oceans welcomed a new member, Melta Marrengula, to help with the patrols. She is the first Mozambique woman in Jangamo to be involved in turtle conservation. Thanks to the Turtle Team’s hard work, more than 200 hatchlings made it to the sea successfully in 2021.

 

 

Love The Oceans launched the second stage of their Sustainable Fishing Project, which is community-led by Gemo Guilamba, Chief Fisherman, and Pascoal Nhamussua, Love The Oceans’ Community Outreach Manager. The project is working to completely eliminate unsustainable net fishing in the area. The initiative now has over 30 kayaks and fishing equipment to go with. Only One’s funding of this initiative has been crucial in this stage and the project has led to local fishermen writing their own legislation to outlaw netting in the Hope Spot.

The first-ever in-situ study into meso and apex predator presence was launched by Love The Oceans, a project supported by Evercare, one of their sponsors, which will go on to be expanded by Love The Oceans Founder and Hope Spot Champion Francesca Trotman’s Ph.D. This project is particularly helpful as Francesca can cross-reference the results with Love The Oceans’ fisheries data to understand more about the sustainability of local fisheries without diver bias. This information is important to inform community projects like the Sustainable Fishing Project.

 

 

Love The Oceans launched their Ocean Conservation Champion Education Program (OCCEP) in 2021. This program sponsors two Ocean Conservation Champions (OCCs) to complete their secondary education. This level of education is not typically available to the children of Jangamo as it requires living in the city and renting a place, as well as school fees, exam fees and money for school supplies. Like Mission Blue, Love The Oceans is a firm believer in education as a tool to change the world. If more children can access higher levels of education, they have more chance of possessing the necessary skills to get a job and ultimately get themselves out of poverty. Poverty alleviation and successful conservation are intrinsically linked as when people have more financial stability, they have more headspace to think about issues like conservation.

 

 

PADI also got involved in LTO’s OCC program, sponsoring two OCCs and LTO’s Community Outreach Manager both their PADI Open Water and their PADI Advanced. This is the most people from Jangamo ever PADI qualified. This program with PADI will be continuing this year, with some exciting developments down the line – stay tuned!

 

 

LTO’s Women Health Project is arguably one of the most ambitious projects launched by Love The Oceans in Jangamo in 2021. In order to create a successful conservation strategy, you need all your stakeholders to have a seat at the table. Women make up 53% of the population in Jangamo Bay so not involving women in conservation would make an incredibly ineffective strategy. This project seeks to give women more options for managing their menstrual cycle – one of the major hurdles standing in the way of women’s education and careers in Jangamo. This project will be growing fast in the next couple of years and we hope to see more women participating in swimming lessons and getting involved in the marine space as a result. Like all Love The Oceans’ projects, this project is also led by members of the local community: Chief Recina Nhamussua and Edna Guilamba.

 

 

The publicity around the Jangamo Bay Hope Spot establishment no doubt aided Love The Oceans as they received two awards for their outstanding work: The Ocean Award from Blue Marine Foundation and BOAT International, and The Regenerative Travel Impact award in the education category for their work with under 18s in the area and their constantly evolving Ocean Conservation Champion initiative.

 

 

If you’d like to support the Hope Spot and Love The Oceans in their marine conservation efforts, you can do so here. You can also go to Mozambique and come to help in person! Read about the opportunities to do that here.