There is something quietly significant about where a conversation happens.

For more than a decade, the Our Ocean Conference has gathered governments, scientists, businesses, philanthropies, youth movements and coastal communities to shape the future of the world’s oceans. This year, for the first time, that conversation came to Africa – to Mombasa, on Kenya’s Swahili Coast.

That matters. Not only because of geography, but because some of the most important ocean stories are already being written here.

The theme, “Our Ocean, Our Heritage, Our Future,” carried particular weight on this coastline, where the ocean is not scenery or science alone. It is food, livelihood, culture, history and identity. It is also pressure – warming seas, plastic pollution, declining fisheries, and the uneven promises of a growing blue economy.

For Wasafiri, this was a first, and we arrived the way you do at any new table – ready to listen.

Stepping into ocean work is not a departure from what we do. It is a natural extension of it. Our work has always sat in the messy middle of change, where no single organisation, government department, funder or community can solve a problem alone. We help people make sense of complexity, build coalitions, learn as they act, and turn shared ambition into coordinated action.

The ocean needs exactly this kind of connective work – because marine conservation is not one issue. It is a whole system, tied to food security, local economies, climate resilience, governance and the futures of young people. The ocean simply makes that impossible to ignore.

I came in with my own lens too. I am a Kenyan marine conservationist, food systems practitioner and filmmaker, but much of my work has been about something simpler and harder to measure: helping people, stories and efforts find each other.

Through working with organisations like Oceans Alive and the Kenya Ocean Guardians Network, I have seen how much powerful ocean work already exists here. I have also seen how often it happens in isolation. A community restores a reef. A school builds ocean literacy. A youth group tells new stories. A beach management unit works to strengthen governance – usually with passion, trust and far too little funding.

The challenge is rarely that there is no action. More often, the challenge is that the action is fragmented.

That was one of my strongest reflections from the week. The rooms were full of ambition. Globally, more than 320 new commitments worth roughly US$6.4 billion were announced, and Kenya, as host, made significant pledges of its own.

There were real milestones: the Mombasa Declaration on fisheries and transparency, regional commitments to expand marine protected areas, and growing support for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.

These commitments matter. They signal political will, and they can unlock finance, attention and new partnerships. But standing in Mombasa, close to the communities and ecosystems they are meant to serve, one question was unavoidable: how do we make sure they reach the water?

How do they reach the reef, the fisher, the young person looking for a future in ocean work, the woman processing the day’s catch, the small organisation trying to keep a programme alive, the community that protected a place long before it appeared in any policy document?

Some of the most meaningful moments were not on the main stage at all. They were in the exhibition halls and side conversations – between fishers and policymakers, researchers and community groups, youth leaders and funders.

It was powerful to attend a PAKPRO session reframing marine plastic pollution in Kenya’s Coast by placing coastal communities, informal waste actors, women, youth cooperatives, and fisher communities at the centre of the circular economy conversation, not as victims, but as people already leading practical solutions.

What I took from Mombasa is that marine conservation is entering a new chapter. The language is shifting from awareness to delivery, from isolated projects to collaboration, from conservation for communities to conservation with them. But that shift is not guaranteed. It will depend on whether finance becomes genuinely accessible, whether local leadership is recognised as expertise, and whether we are brave enough to ask who benefits from the blue economy – and who carries its costs.

For me, the feeling of the conference was hope with teeth. There was beauty, pride and real energy along the coast. But there was also impatience, the good kind – the kind that says we have had enough elegant language, and now we need to see it reach the water.

Wasafiri’s role in this next chapter is not to arrive with all the answers. It is to help ask better questions, connect the right people, and bring our experience in systems change to a field that urgently needs it.

If systems change begins with relationships, then the conversations we started in Mombasa are only the beginning.
The ocean agenda has come home to Africa. Now the work is to make sure it does not leave communities behind.

And if you are part of this work too – restoring a coastline, telling a new story, holding a fragile programme together – we would love to find each other.