Women lifting a hay thatch roof onto a bamboo frame to build a bird shelter.
Project · Pilot · 16 March to 16 June 2026

The Mangrove Lab

Six women from Bali Island spent thirteen weeks looking closely at the mangroves they grew up beside, then decided for themselves what to do about what they saw.

At a glance
WhereBali Island, Gosaba Block, Sundarbans
WhenMar–Jun 2026, and still going
Who6 women stewards
Supported byWomen for Conservation seed grant
Sessions48 (25 learning, 23 building)
Problems chosenCoastal erosion, pollinator decline, plastic
Prototypes6 built and tested
Reach400+ community members
The question we were testing

Can women move from delivering conservation to shaping it?

Most programmes bring women in to carry out a plan someone else wrote. The Lab tested the opposite: a low-cost, three-month, hands-on space where the women set the agenda.

The Lab met in The Grove, a rented village home, and learned outdoors in the mangroves. Simran acted as a catalyst, bringing frameworks, science, materials and introductions, but left the two big decisions to the women: what to work on, and how.

Five women seated on a mat outdoors, painting and drawing together.
An early session at The Grove, March 2026
How the group formed

Nobody was selected

The Lab reached more than 50 women across Bali and nearby villages. Formal interviews and group pitches didn't work. What worked was inviting women to make things together informally, a taste of the Lab without the pressure to perform.

The first two or three women brought their neighbours, and the group organised itself around whoever kept showing up. No formal education was needed, only curiosity and a lived relationship with the land and water. Attendance stayed at 100%, 99% and 91% across the three months.

A young woman looks through binoculars on the riverbank while another smiles beside her.
A bird walk on the riverbank, March 2026
The journey

Thirteen weeks, five phases

weeks 1–4

Immerse in the ecosystem

Appreciative inquiry and trust before problems: mangrove walks, ecosystem role-play, photo stories, childhood memories, and a shared map of everything the mangroves do. In this phase the women also ran their first public event, Play for Nature.

weeks 5–7

Map what's changing

The group chose Madhu Khaal, a tidal canal in Bali 5 village that runs from fresh water upstream to salt water downstream. They chose it because they knew it, could reach it, and could see it degrading. Around ten households depend on it for fishing and dry-season farming.

Three weeks of observation, journaling and conversations surfaced the canal's history: how it got its name, a tiger encounter, a child saved from the river. The group grouped what they saw into four clusters: water quality, falling groundwater, monsoon roads, and mangrove loss along the bank.

The women's mind map of mangrove ecosystem functions.
The women's map of what mangroves do
week 8

Understand it deeply, then choose

Using root-cause analysis alongside immersive walks and community dialogue, the women set five tests for any problem they would take on. These criteria are the heart of the model:

  1. It is a real, locally observed change.
  2. It matters to the women themselves.
  3. It connects the ecological and the social.
  4. It is interesting and exciting to them.
  5. It is something they can actually influence, with potential for a tangible prototype.
weeks 9–12

Adapt, then prototype

After the canal clean-up, state elections changed the local government and the site permissions stopped being valid. Instead of waiting, the group asked itself again what mattered most. Three linked challenges came out: coastal erosion, the decline of native pollinators, and plastic in the rivers. They moved to small, fast prototypes, often designed and built within 48 hours.

week 13

Share it with the village

The Mangrove Lab Exhibition, held on 16 June 2026 in a pandal built with neighbours' help. More than 150 people came, including 12 local leaders and institutional guests from the Forest Department, DISHA NGO and local schools. Each woman presented a prototype in a session called “Voices from the Mangrove”. Local women artists and artisans exhibited alongside them.

The prototypes

Six experiments, each one the women's idea

A dense block of mangrove saplings in polybags.
Coastal erosion · mangrove loss

The Mangrove Nursery

Summer heat made planting on the mudflats impossible, and the political changes ruled out public land by the river. So the group raised mangroves first, in a nursery on land offered by Anjali. They visited a local mangrove nursery to learn the craft, then began with three species that can be grown inland.

The disagreement
A trained nursery manager advised keeping seedlings in salt water from the start. Drawing on generations of growing mangroves in their backyards, the women tested fresh water instead: seeds tied in fishing nets and floated in a pond for 15–20 days, against direct potting. Fresh water gave faster, stronger results for the Sundari.
What it showed
Mangroves are facultative halophytes: they tolerate salt but don't depend on it. Salt keeps faster-growing plants away. It isn't food. So inland households with no tidal access can raise native mangrove stock, which widens who can take part in restoration.
Results
213 of the first 230 seedlings survived (93%). After the pilot, the women collected more propagules from the riverbanks, and the nursery grew to 8 native species. About 500 saplings have since been planted out with the Sundarbans Forest Department and are being monitored. A new nursery focused on the endangered Sundari has begun.
  • Sundari Heritiera fomes
  • Kankra Bruguiera gymnorhiza
  • Jat bain Avicennia officinalis
  • Peyara bain Avicennia marina
  • Dhundul Xylocarpus granatum
  • Passur Xylocarpus mekongensis
  • Jhati goran Ceriops decandra
  • Math goran Ceriops tagal
  • Garjan Rhizophora sp.
A smiling woman crouches beside a newly planted mango sapling.
Pollinator decline

Pollinator Garden

The women had noticed fewer native bees and butterflies in the villages, and linked it to the loss of flowering and fruiting plants. Around the nursery they planted 15 native and locally naturalised species, chosen from what they knew grew well and what they had seen insects and birds visit.

Why this mix
It covers the whole year, not one season. Palash and mango carry late winter, the flame tree, jamrul, guava and pomelo cover the hot months, jasmine and champa carry the monsoon, and kul flowers in the post-monsoon gap. Night-scented flowers feed moths, which most pollinator gardens ignore. Several of the plants are classic honeybee forage, and honey is a livelihood here.
What happened
Planted on World Environment Day. Neighbours and friends joined in without being asked, the first spontaneous community help at the site. It is now an observation site for tracking which pollinators arrive over time.
  • Krishnachura
  • Palash
  • Joba
  • Jui
  • Champa
  • Gandharaj
  • Aam
  • Jamrul
  • Batabi lebu
  • Paati lebu
  • Peyara
  • Kul
Women lifting the thatch roof onto the bird shelter.
Declining birds

Bird Shelter

Birds the women grew up with were becoming harder to see. The elders remembered sparrows nesting in hay roofs, before tin and asbestos replaced them. Could they rebuild some of what had been lost? Pratima and Anjali led the design: a simple shelter of bamboo and hay.

What happened
No sparrows have nested yet, but within weeks the shelter had regular visitors. Common mynas, Eurasian collared doves and black drongos are confirmed users, and jungle babblers and kingfishers stop by. The shelter is now part of ongoing bird monitoring.
Four women in masks and gloves collecting plastic with a net-on-a-pole tool.
Plastic in the rivers

Canal Clean-up & Awareness

Plastic was piling up in the canal, the village had no waste system, and the monsoon was coming to carry it all into the river. The water was too polluted to enter, so the women designed collection tools from bamboo poles and old fishing nets.

What happened
A four-hour clean-up removed about 40 kg of plastic, glass and medical waste. Five posters went up, and ten households were visited for door-to-door conversations. When neighbours suggested burning or burying the waste, the women refused. They routed recyclables through local ragpickers to processing in Kolkata instead.
What it revealed
A systems problem: there is no village waste management at all. Canal restoration (removing water hyacinth, replanting mangroves) is paused until site access returns.
A watercolour of the Sundarbans shown at the exhibition.
The next generation

Children of the Mangroves

Children here grow up surrounded by an extraordinary ecosystem but learn about it mostly from textbooks. Moumita and Sonali designed a session that treated children as people with knowledge of their own, using music, dance, stories and play.

What happened
25 children aged 3–12 and 18 adults came. Activities included a mangrove treasure hunt (Guptadhan), a “save the nest” game (Baas Bachao), elders' stories, and a tour of the nursery and bird shelter. By the group's own account it was the most joyful day of the pilot, and the one after which they felt ready for the exhibition.
Awareness

Play for Nature

As they explored how everything in the mangroves connects, the women realised that many neighbours, especially children, rarely got to learn about them. They designed outdoor games inspired by nature.

What happened
About 20 people were expected and more than 50 came. For the first time, the women designed, organised and ran a public event themselves, and the community left asking, “When is the next one?”
What was hard

Not everything went to plan

We'd rather name the difficulties than hide them. They shaped the model as much as the successes did.

A change of government cancelled our permissions

Permissions from the Panchayat and Forest Department were in place before work began. After the state elections they no longer held. What we did: asked the women again what mattered most. That conversation produced the nursery, on private land. Canal restoration is still paused.

Weather is the operating condition

Storm surges, heavy rain, extreme heat, power cuts and network outages. A storm bent the new nursery fence the day after it went up. What we did: rescheduled with the women, kept safety first, and grew saplings in the nursery until the monsoon planting window.

Resistance at home and in the community

Early on, some families were wary of women leaving home for the sessions, and some men said women didn't understand construction. Confidence dipped. What changed: through patient conversations and open invitations, by June neighbouring men were helping build the bird shelter and plant the garden.

Ownership grew unevenly

Attendance was near-perfect, but engagement varied. What we did: rotated responsibilities, split roles by interest, and had one honest conversation about why the work mattered. It built more trust than any smooth session.

Learning more didn't always mean wanting to act

After a deep dive on plastic, the group understood the problem better and doubted they could change it. What we did: switched to 48-hour prototypes and started small. Action eased climate anxiety more reliably than information raised motivation.

Very little science in Bengali

Ecological learning material in Bengali is scarce, which limited independent research. What's next: co-creating field guides, storybooks and films in Bengali with the women, a project in its own right.

What we learned

Six things we'd tell anyone trying this

Start with curiosity, not solutions

Beginning with connection and memory built trust faster. The diagnostic work still happened, later and better.

Local knowledge changes the questions

The nursery site, the species, the seed timing, the bird shelter and the freshwater experiment all came from the women, not the programme design.

Prototypes lower the barrier

Waiting for the perfect solution costs momentum. 48-hour builds brought it back.

Constraints are part of the process

Losing the canal site is what produced the nursery. Adapting wasn't a fallback. It was how the work moved forward.

Ownership grows slowly

It grows through repeated chances to decide, lead and be responsible. Three months is enough to start it, not to finish it.

Women-led still needs the wider web

Land, permissions and legitimacy depend on relationships beyond the group. Bring leaders and institutions in early.

The work continues

Who is a conservationist?

Someone in deep relationship with their ecosystem, with the agency to act on it. These six women already had the first half before we met. The Lab set out to build the second.

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