The sea wall was built to protect the Vasco da Gama pillar in Malindi. Historical sites along Kenya’s coastline are being threatened by climate-change-induced weather conditions. Credit: Diana Wanyonyi/IPS

By Diana Wanyonyi
MOMBASA, May 9 2023 (IPS)

Along coastal Kenya, historical sites and monuments are threatened due to the impacts of climate change—structures along the Indian Ocean are falling to ruin or collapsing into the ocean because of high tides.

One threatened historical site was the Portuguese-built Fort Jesus, located on Mombasa Island. In 2011, the fort was declared a World Heritage Site by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, as one of the most outstanding and well-preserved examples of Portuguese military fortifications. But unfortunately, the fort, which has been standing tall for more than 500 years, was threatened by high tides and strong winds from the Indian Ocean, which was eroding its massive rock foundation.

Lucky three years ago, Fort Jesus was secured from erosion caused by strong tides after the government, in collaboration with National Museums of Kenya, constructed a seawall on the eastern side of the Fort that faces the Indian Ocean.

Fatma Twahir, the principal curator of Fort Jesus, says that before the construction of the seawall, the coral base of Fort Jesus was badly eroded.

“The base of Fort Jesus was badly damaged, and there were worries that it would lose stability. We brought in engineers who investigated, and they confirmed our fears saying that if we did not act fast, the Fort might collapse into the Indian Ocean. We informed the national government, and it stepped in. The government gave us 497 million Kenyan shillings (about USD 3,6 million) for the contractor to build a sea wall; the construction commenced in June 2017 and ended in February 2019,” Twahir said.

One of the issues Kenya’s coastal region experiences is what’s known as the India Ocean Dipole, says Jennifer Fitchett, Associate Professor of Physical Geography, University of the Witwatersrand, in an article in The Conversation. This causes heavy rainfall. She notes that “under climate change, the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events is increasing. We can therefore expect to experience strong 2°C Indian Ocean Dipoles more often in the years and decades to come.”

US Aid notes too that “most of the country’s coast is low-lying, with coastal plains, islands, beaches, wetlands, and estuaries at risk from sea level rise. A sea level rise of 30 cm is estimated to threaten 17 percent (4,600 hectares) of Mombasa with inundation.”

Twenty kilometres from Mombasa, north of Mtwapa Creek in Kilifi County, are the Jumba la Mtwana ruins. Jumba la Mtwana is a Swahili word meaning the ‘large house of the slave’. Although there are no written historical records of the ruins, the ceramic evidence during excavations showed that the town had been built in the 14th century and became a significant slave port before it was abandoned in the early 15th century.

The ruins, near the Indian Ocean, include a tomb that is believed to be that of one of the sultans who ruled the area. Also, four mosques and four houses have survived the impact of climate change and are still in good condition. The inhabitants of the Jumba ruins were mainly Muslims, as evidenced by the number of ruined mosques.

The mosques are still used for prayers by fishers, locals, and visitors.

An Arabic inscription on the column adjacent to the tomb says, “Every Soul Shall Taste Death.”

Jumba Ruins are also affected by climate change as many of the building structures have been damaged by either strong winds or eroded by the encroaching ocean tides, impacting the ruins’ coral walls.

Chengo Kalume is a resident and a fisher who has been working in the area for more than 25 years. He says strong ocean tides have destroyed a large portion of the ruins. Thirty years ago, when he was young, the ruins were in good condition.

“While I was growing up, this ruin was not damaged, and the ocean tide was not reaching near it, but when the temperatures started changing, the ocean tides were becoming stronger and stronger ocean waves hit hard on the shoreline, the waters started rising, and it started reaching the structures of the ruins. That is when the walls started breaking and crumbling,” he lamented.

He worries that if urgent action isn’t taken, the ruins will be swept away and forgotten. “I am worried that if the ruin is not preserved early, then future generations will not be able to see them; they will only be reading about it through the books,” said Kalume.

For Kalume, unpredictable ocean storms and strong winds made him quit his fishing career, making him prone to accidents such as his boat capsizing in inclement weather. Also, a change in weather in the ocean contributed to the disappearance of some fish species.

He remembers, “On several occasions, while I was going fishing, the weather was calm and promising all of a sudden while in the deep sea, the ocean waves changed and became stronger and stronger, this weakened our fishing vessel, and also this made some fish disappear such as barracuda, tuna and parrot fish. I always came back to the shore with a small catch.”

However, building sea walls is not an option for this area.

Hashim Mzomba, the curator-in-charge of Jumba la Mtwana Ruins, says the shoreline provides a good nesting place for sea turtles.

“Because this shoreline is a sea turtle’s breeding nest, we prefer to plant trees that will be able to break the winds. This will also reduce the impact of strong ocean tides.”

The Vasco da Gama pillar in Malindi, some 120 kilometres northeast of Mombasa, was also in a state of disrepair following the weakening of its coral rock base caused by strong ocean tides. The pillar is one of the oldest remaining monuments in Africa and was built in 1498 by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama as a sign of appreciation for the welcome the Sultan of Malindi gave him.

“Climate change weakened the pillar for a long time; two years ago, the government stepped in and constructed a sea wall around the pillar,” said Omar Abdulrahim Abdallah, principal curator of Vasco Da Gama pillar.
IPS UN Bureau Report

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Drone visual of the area in Upper East Region, Ghana prior to restoration taken in 2015. Experts say that Africa’s youth need to become involved in land restoration projects. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah /IPS

By Diana Wanyonyi and Nalisha Adams
ACCRA, Ghana/JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Nov 1 2019 (IPS)

The last time Siyabulela Sokomani ran a marathon he did so with a tree strapped to his back. A native wild olive sapling to be exact. It affected his race time for sure, with the seasoned runner completing the 42.2 km race in 4.42 hours rather than his usual 3.37 hours.

But the entrepreneur, who is co-owner of the ethical South African nursery Shoots and Roots, which uses controlled release fertilisers, which are less harmful to the environment, and 70 percent less pesticides, was doing it for a good cause.

The #runningtreecampaign — a fundraising effort by the non-profit Township Farmers which Sokomani started with children’s rights activist Ondela Manjezi — was raising funds to plant some 2,000 indigenous trees in the former apartheid black housing area of Khayelitsha. In addition to planting trees, Township Farmers also educates school kids about gardening their own vegetables and how to plant and take care of trees.

Sokomani grew up in Khayelitsha an area known for the distinctive white, beach sand — in which you can still find seashells — which serves as soil. It’s an environment in which only indigenous plants can flourish.

Under apartheid these areas received little or no services, and had no green spaces. And many still lack this. It was only thanks to a teacher who taught him and his classmates about the importance of the environment, recycling and growing your own food that Sokomani pursued studies and eventually a career in horticulture.

“There was nothing. There was not even a culture of planting trees. The main thing that people strived for was to get a job and to feed their families,” he tells IPS.

So Sokomani and his friends and colleagues hit the pavement, completed the Cape Town marathon and raised the money for the indigenous trees. They have already started planting them in schools in Khayelitsha — starting with Sokomani’s alma mater, Zola Senior Secondary School.

Dotted around the schools are now wild olive, sand olive and silver oak trees, among others.

In September, horticulturalist and entrepreneur Siyabulela Sokomani (right) and friends ran the Cape Town marathon with wild olive saplings trapped to their backs to raise funding for 2,000 indigenous trees which planted in the disadvantaged township of Kayaltishea, South Africa. Courtesy: Siyabulela Sokomani

Making a business out of land restoration

The 34-year-old Sokomani, who was elected as a youth ambassador leading restoration initiatives by the 4th African Forest Landscape Restoration (AFR100), has just returned from Ghana’s capital, Accra, where the annual meeting concluded this week.

His attendance at AFR100, a project where African countries have committed to restore over 111 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, was important. As an entrepreneur Sokomani was there to show other African youth how to create viable business opportunities within the land restoration space.

Shoots and Roots has a number large clients in South Africa, regularly providing 150,000 to 200,000 indigenous trees to single clients in one order, and with a capacity to grow one million trees.

“We are missing something. We are missing the youth being actively involved in the management side of things,” Sokomani pointed out.

The AFR100 Secretariat at the African Union’s development agency, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), coordinates restoration activities on the continent, with support from the initiative’s technical partners, including the Center for International Forestry Research, United Nations Environment and World Resources Institute (WRI), among others.

Land degradation remains a threat to global security, according to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, with two-thirds of Africa comprising desert or drylands. UNCCD figures show that in 2019 some 45 million people across Africa, mostly from East and Southern Africa, are food insecure.

Aside from restored land providing food security, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in August states that better land management can help combat global warming and limit the release of greenhouse gases. The report authors recommended vigorous action to halt soil damage and desertification.

Engaging the energy and innovation of Africa’s youth

But many believe that without engaging the youth in these activities, success may not be possible.

“We have to engage young people meaningfully, invest in them. We need to harness their energy or get out of the way. Are we ready for these young people?” Wanjira Mathai, co-chair of the World Resources Institute’s Global Restoration Council and the current Chair of of the Wangari Maathai Foundation, told the meeting. Mathai’s mother was the late Wangari Maathai — the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and an environmentalist and human rights activist.

Speaking to IPS, Mathai said that youth were an “incredibly important demographic in this restoration movement” as they were Africa’s largest demographic. Some 60 percent of Africa’s population is under the age of 25.

“If you don’t work with youth, who are you working with because they are after all the majority.

“Restoration and many environmental initiatives are very slow and deep because they take time, it takes 30 years for some trees to mature and that is fast in our tropics, it could be even longer — 90 years in Scandinavia. The generation that is actually going to deliver a lot of these ambitions and ambitious commitments that are being made today are the youth,” Mathai told IPS.

She said young people “want to be involved in entrepreneurship ventures many of them are environmentalists but we have not created spaces for them, we only often think they are too young”.

Mathai said that it was not obvious to many nations that the youth should be involved in land restoration and environmental efforts and that new and innovative ways needed to be explored to support youth engagement.

“What we know for sure is that if we leave them out, we leave them out at our own peril because they are energetic, they think differently and they are operating on a completely different level of consciousness that is needed especially for this decade that 2013 is end of a lot of different ambitious targets,” Mathai told IPS.

According to the African Development Bank, 420 million of the continent’s youth aged 15 to 35 are unemployed.

Creating jobs by financing entrepreneurs

This challenge can be solved if the youth venture into agroforestry, says Honorine Uwase Hirwa, founder Rwanda’s Youth Forest Landscape Restoration initiative, which has trained more than 15,000 young Rwandans to plant trees.

“There’s an opportunity especially on this restoration movement, one can establish a tree nursery, one can plant fruit trees and sell the fruit, there is a lot of opportunity when it comes to restoration it’s a matters of empowering them with knowledge and making it easy for them to access the finance,” she told IPS.

Sokomani agrees.

As a South African in the Western Cape province, where only 4,9 percent of agricultural land is owned by the black population, for Sokomani it was particularly hard to succeed in a business that requires land.

But Sokomani has not received bank or grant funding for his business and instead was able to make a success of the business, thanks to the involvement of a business partner and former client, Carl Pretorius.

But he tells IPS, “you won’t get anywhere unless you have a passion for trees…it’s all about the passion and what you do”.

Land restoration more than planting trees

“Forest landscape restoration is more than just planting trees,” Mamadou Diakhite, Sustainable Land and Water Management (SLWM) team leader at NEPAD, told the meeting.

Later, he told IPS why this had to be differentiated: “We had to  make this statement loud and clear because there are some papers now including scientific papers that are being written and disseminated that portray and show AFR100 initiative as only planning trees, fencing them and preventing communities and people to access it which is the exact opposite, that’s is why we say that restoration is beyond only tree planting. It is more about agro forestry and agro ecology systems.”

Mathai concurred: “Sometimes there are agro forestry which are food production and trees and sometimes they are purely for food production. It is about understanding the landscape, the mosaic of the landscape and then maintaining the integrity of the landscape as a whole. The reason you hear us mentioning that all the time is to remind ourselves that landscapes occur in mosaics.”

Horticulture — a business opportunity right in front of you

For Sokomani, the type of trees planted remains important. He said that while we often hear about large, bold initiatives of forests of trees being planted in a single day, he questioned the types of trees planted.

“If we don’t create entrepreneurial opportunities through the establishment of nurseries that are growing [indigenous] trees and, in some areas, [indigenous] grasslands and bulbs and plants that actually thrive in those areas, we are really going to be messing up,” the horticulturist said.

He said he heard of land restoration efforts where the Chinese Popular, a non-indigenous tree, was being used. “You can’t restore degraded land with exotic species.”

He said indigenous trees should also be grown and propagated among local communities and the resultant horticultural enterprises could also prevent migration of local populations to larger cities.

“For the youth out there in Africa, Asia and South Africa, I always say it is very easy to start a horticulture business because your initial inputs are right in front of you. You can get seeds from a tree, from your block or from a forest, you can do division, you can do many other propagation techniques that you actually just start your business,” he said.

Sokomani said that if someone didn’t study horticulture like he did it would require a little bit of effort to learn the techniques, but he insisted that he didn’t believe in the myth of “green fingers” and anyone could learn to propagate and grown plants.

This weekend the horticulturist/marathon runner will slip into on running shoes and participate in one of South Africa’s well-known races – the Soweto marathon. This time though, he will be doing it without a tree strapped to his back.

“Let’s start today, because we really don’t have time when it comes to mitigating climate change.”

People at Gasi Beach in Kwale County, on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, wait for fishermen to buy the daily catch. Credit: Diana Wanyonyi/IPS

By Diana Wanyonyi
KWALE, Kenya, Nov 28 2016 (IPS)

It’s Saturday morning and Hafsa Juma* is seated on a traditional mat known locally as a mkeka under the scorching sun outside her homestead, located near Gasi Beach on the Kenyan coast.

Clad in a traditional Swahili dress known as a dera, complemented by a mtandio wrapped around her head, Hafsa, 15, says she has been suffering from flu and headaches for more than a week. She hoped the hot sun might ease her chills and shivering, since her parents are unemployed and too poor to pay for a doctor visit."As much as I don’t like what I do, I'm forced to do it because we need to survive.” -- Asumpta, age 14

Hafsa is one of many girls who barter their bodies for fish and a little money at Gasi Beach on the Indian Ocean, in Kwale County. The oldest of three siblings, she is the breadwinner for her family.

Living near the beach, she is easy prey for male fishermen. She said started sex work two years ago.

“I completed standard eight [the final year of primary school] in 2014,” she said. “My parents are not well and that is why there is no food to eat at home. I’m forced to go and look for something small to bring home. I leave at around 8 p.m. and I come back to the house at around 12 a.m. Every night, I have one client. After he agrees to my demands, he gives me 200 shillings (about two dollars) and half a kilogramme of fish,” she said, avoiding eye contact.

Hafsa described being forced by her parents, especially her mother, to provide food for her family by offering sexual favours to male fishermen.

“I usually go to Gasi beach every day,” the teenager said. “In a month, if I work well, I get 5,000 Kenyan shillings (equivalent to 50 dollars) and I don’t have a problem with that.”

Walking with Hafsa along the shore of the Indian Ocean, our conversation is interrupted by a green wooden fishing boat with fishermen from the deep sea approaching the shore, where women, men and children with baskets eagerly wait to buy fresh fish from the fishermen coming in from the night catch.

Most of Hafsa’s clients are fishermen from the neighbouring country of Tanzania, who travel to Gasi once a year during the northeast monsoon winds and stay there for three months, from December to March, to fish and sell their catch.

After the monsoon season is over, and the foreign fishermen go back home, her clients are mostly motorcyclists who carry passengers, locally known as bodaboda.

“When I want to go to any given place away from home, I just board a motorcycle. When I’m almost at my destination, the bodaboda rider agrees to have sex for money. He gives me 100 shillings, and I also do the same with different bodaboda men to return home.”

Iddi Abdulrahman Juma is vice chairman of the Gasi Beach Management Unit, and a beneficiary of training from a non-governmental organisation known as Strengthening Community Partnership and Empowerment (SCOPE) that works to end commercial sexual exploitation of children in Kwale County. Juma blamed parents and guardians for making children vulnerable by sending them to buy fish at the beach.

“We’ve been seeing like 10 children coming here to the beach to buy fish, which is also dangerous. Some of them are already pregnant and others infected with deadly diseases. The age group of children who indulge in commercial sexual exploitation is between 12 and 17 years old,” he said.

Twenty kilometers from Gasi, in the Karanja area of Kwale County, 14-year-old Asumpta Pendo* sweeps out a thatched mud shanty. She says it is a mangwe — a place where palm wine known as mnazi (a traditional liquor) is sold.

Just like Hafsa, Asumpta also indulges in sex for money with clients, often drunk, just to put food on her family’s table. She is also forced by her mother to sell mnazi.

“I dropped out in class seven because my mother was unable to educate me and we live in poverty. Life is hard,” she said. “Most of my clients are palm wine drinkers. In a day, I usually get one or two clients. Some of them prefer to use condoms, while others refuse. They usually give me money — between a dollar and 12 dollars a night.

“If I refuse to sell palm wine to male customers here at home, my mother beats me and goes to the extent of denying me food. As much as I don’t like what I do, I’m forced to do it because we need to survive,” Assumpta said.

A 2009 baseline survey conducted by the End Child Prostitution in Kenya network, an umbrella of various civil society organisations, found 10,000 to 15,000 girls living in the coastal areas to be involved in child sex tourism.

To address this problem, SCOPE has partnered with the organization Terre des Hommes (TDH) from the Netherlands to implement a programme aimed at ending the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in Kwale County and three sub-counties, Matunga, Msambweni and Lunga Lunga.

The strategy includes creating awareness among the general community and calling on local citizen constituencies to raise their voices against these abuses.

The coordinator of SCOPE’s End Commercial Sex programme, Emanuel Kahaso, said that the problem is serious in Kwale County, popular with tourists for its clean, sandy beaches.

“In 2006, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reported that there were more than 50,000 children in Kenya who have engaged in sexual exploitation and 30,000 who are selling their bodies along the beaches in coastal Kenya,” he said.

“As an organisation, we also found out that more than 15,000 children here in the Kenyan south coast are used for commercial sex work in tourism,” he said. “Because of traditions and taboos, parents do not talk openly with their children about reproductive health and some of the perpetrators who are found guilty of the vice are not arrested because of these taboos.”

Emerging hotspots such as drug dens, nightclubs and discotheques, as well as an increase in bodaboda transport, have lured many children into commercial sex. According to local sources, in many instances, early marriage and commercial sex work have been initiated by parents, as well as child sex tourism and prostitution along the beach areas.

The problem is further exacerbated by the cultures and traditions of the local tribes, which are gender-biased and support various forms of sexual exploitation of children. Illiteracy is high, the economy is poor and laws to protect children are rarely enforced.

At Msambweni Referral County Hospital, Saumu Ramwendo, a community health worker for SCOPE, empowers and counsels young girls on health matters and fighting commercial sexual exploitation. The group has so far been able to reach 360 children who are the victims of sexual exploitation and 500 others considered at risk.

*Names have been changed to protect their identities.