A woman in a blue sari stands at the river's edge on Bali Island, arms spread wide over the water.
Bali Island · Sundarbans · India

Who is a conservationist?

Women in the Sundarbans deciding how their own mangrove landscape is cared for, and building the solutions themselves.

Begin
The place

Where the river meets the sea

The Sundarbans is the world's largest mangrove forest, a maze of tidal creeks and mudflats at the mouth of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna, remade by the tide twice a day.

It is the only place where the Royal Bengal tiger has learned to live in a saltwater forest. Mangrove roots hold the mud together, slow the storm surge, and shelter the fish, crabs and birds that families here have always lived alongside.

A tidal creek winding between mangrove banks under a cloudy sky.
A tidal creek at low water, Sundarbans
As you scroll, the tide comes in
10,000 km²

of forest and water, shared between India and Bangladesh. About 7–8% of all the world's mangroves.

4.5 million

people live on its 102 tidal islands, fishing, farming, and collecting crabs and honey.

24%

of its mangrove cover has been lost in recent decades.

~2×

The sea here is rising about twice as fast as the global average, pushing salt inland and eating at the shore.

The people who know it best

Women read this landscape every day

They fish its creeks, farm its edges, fetch its water and tend its ponds. They save seeds, read the seasons in the wind, and notice when the birds stop coming back.

With many men leaving the islands to find work, it is often women who hold the household, the land and the forest together. Their knowledge lives in stories, songs and daily habit, and almost never in the rooms where conservation is decided.

“I didn't realise how much we already knew.”  Puspa

A woman in a red sari on the riverbank holds up a rooted mangrove seedling and explains it.
Explaining how a mangrove seedling roots, on the riverbank at Bali
A watercolour painting of the Sundarbans: a spotted deer on the village side, a tiger in the forest, and a long nylon net fence between them along the river.
On Bali, the village and the tiger's forest are separated by a river channel and a long nylon net. A painting shown at the Mangrove Lab Exhibition.
What usually happens

When women are brought into conservation, it tends to look like this

All three share one thing: women are asked to deliver a conservation goal someone else set.

So WOCAL asked a different question

What if women delivered conservation?

Participation asks

“Will you help us do this?”

Agency asks

“What do you think needs to be done?”

Our approach

Five roots that hold everything up

A mangrove stands in shifting mud because its roots spread wide. WOCAL works the same way. Five conditions hold the work steady, and the women decide what grows from them.

root one

Curiosity

Learning starts with questions, not a syllabus. It follows what the women notice on walks, in stories and in their own backyards, and moves at the pace of wonder.

root two

Safety

A place to try things, disagree and get it wrong without judgement. Trust is built before ideas, with families as well as with the women themselves.

root three

Agency

Trust over control. The women choose which problems matter, how to look into them, and what to build in response. Nobody hands them a plan.

root four

Access

Removing what keeps women out: time, cost, language, tools. Bringing in knowledge, materials and introductions to institutions that aren't otherwise within reach.

root five

Co-creation

Local ecological knowledge and conservation science side by side, each tested against what the ecosystem itself has to say.

Simran's role

A catalyst, not a director. She brings what isn't easily available locally (frameworks, scientific information, materials, introductions) and deliberately stays out of the two decisions that matter most: which problems to work on, and how to solve them.

Women sitting on a wooden jetty among mangroves with notebooks and a field guide.
A chart-paper mind map titled Mangroves, ecosystem functions, with sticky notes for nursery, habitat, coastal protection, livelihoods and more.
Women sitting on the riverbank grass, looking closely at a mangrove sprig.
Women lifting a hay thatch roof onto a bamboo frame to build a bird shelter.
A woman speaks into a microphone under a blue canopy at the Mangrove Lab Exhibition.
The Mangrove Lab · our pilot · March to June 2026
ImmerseMapUnderstandPrototypeShare
first, fall in love with it again

Immerse

Six women who had lived beside the mangroves all their lives walked into them together, slowly. They used role-play, photo stories and childhood memories. “This was the first time I truly experienced the mangroves up close.”

then, notice what's changing

Map

They chose a tidal canal in their own village and spent three weeks observing it, talking to the families who depend on it, and mapping what was alive and what was degrading.

ask why

Understand

Using root-cause tools alongside their own knowledge, they picked what to act on. It had to be real, matter to them, link nature and people, excite them, and be something they could actually change.

build it in 48 hours

Prototype

Small, fast experiments instead of perfect plans: a nursery, a pollinator garden, a bird shelter, a canal clean-up, and games for children. Acting, it turned out, eased climate anxiety better than more information did.

stand in front of the village

Share

The Mangrove Lab Exhibition. More than 150 people came, including the Forest Department and local leaders, and each woman presented her own work. For five of them it was the first time speaking in public.

Explore the Mangrove Lab →

One story from the Lab

The nursery that began with a disagreement

Mangrove propagules, fruits, leaves and flowers laid out on a woven mat for identification.
Women examining a mangrove sprig on the riverbank.
A palm full of dark mangrove seeds beginning to sprout.
A dense block of healthy mangrove saplings in black polybags.
Women tending mangrove seedlings under green shade netting.
the expert said

A trained nursery manager told the women that mangroves need salt water and a riverfront. Their inland site, he said, would never work.

the women said

They pointed at mangroves that had grown in their own backyards, far from the river, for generations.

so they tested it

Seeds tied in old fishing nets and floated in a freshwater pond for two weeks, against seeds planted straight into pots. Freshwater worked better for the Sundari.

the result93%

213 of the first 230 seedlings survived.

Mangroves tolerate salt. They don't need it. Salt isn't food. It's refuge.

Which means families far from the tide can raise mangroves too. Neither knowledge won. Both were tested.

Since then

About 500 mangroves are now in the ground

The nursery grew to eight native species. The saplings have been planted out in collaboration with the Sundarbans Forest Department, and their growth is being monitored.

And a new nursery has begun, for the Sundari, the endangered tree the Sundarbans is named after.

What they built

Six ideas, designed and built by the women

They chose three problems they were living with: coastal erosion and mangrove loss, disappearing pollinators, and plastic in the rivers. Then they started building.

Coastal erosion

The Mangrove Nursery

Built on land offered by Anjali after permissions for public land fell through. It started with 2 species and grew to 8.

Pollinators

Pollinator Garden

15 native plants chosen so something is in flower all year round, for bees, butterflies, moths and sunbirds. Neighbours joined the planting unasked.

Birds

Bird Shelter

The elders remembered sparrows nesting in thatched roofs before tin replaced them, so they rebuilt one from bamboo and hay. Mynas, doves and drongos moved in.

Plastic

Canal Clean-up

Collection tools made from bamboo and old fishing nets. Around 40 kg of plastic, glass and medical waste came out before the monsoon could carry it to the river.

The next generation

Children of the Mangroves

A treasure hunt, a “save the nest” game, elders' stories and a nursery tour for 25 children. By the women's own account, the most joyful day of the pilot.

Awareness

Play for Nature

Outdoor games about the mangroves. The women expected 20 people and more than 50 came. The question everyone asked: “When is the next one?”

Who lives here?

The neighbours the women are learning to name

On walks and with a camera, the women have documented around 60 species on Bali Island. Can you guess these? Tap a card to find out.

0 of 6 found

The women

Six women from forest-fringe villages of the Sundarbans

Nobody was selected for credentials. The group formed around the women who kept showing up, and brought their neighbours.

Women sitting together at the roadside beside a paddy field, laughing.
AJ

Anjali Jana

Has woven kantha since she was fifteen. A gardener, and the nursery grows on her land.

“I want to learn more about mangroves and teach children about them.”
PJ

Pratima Jana

Decades as a prawn-seed collector deep in the mangroves. Knows its trees and seeds like few others.

“I want to grow this into a larger community project that brings birds back to the landscape.”
PM

Puspa Mondal

Writer, poet and musician. Started writing about birds and trees again during the Lab.

“My dream is to do something for nature that inspires more women to protect it.”
MB

Moumita Barkandaj

Keeps the nursery's daily records, so much of what we know about it comes from her notebooks.

“I want to tell the older children how we can make our environment pollution-free.”
SB

Sonali Bera

Community Coordinator. A self-taught wildlife photographer and storyteller.

“I want to conserve nature and birds, and help women in my village become independent.”
SJ

Susmita Jana

Waters and tends the nursery every day, and is often the first to speak up.

“We have planted a few mangrove seeds. In the future, I want to plant many more.”
I lost my fear of speaking since we went to see the mangroves on our first visit. This is my first income ever. What happens after three months? We want to keep working together. Inspired by our example, many others are now collecting discarded plastic in sacks. It has been a true joy to learn with each other. Our families told us that they would stand by us.
What the pilot added up to

Small numbers, deep roots

0women stewards, and all six completed the Lab
0sessions of learning and building in 13 weeks
0community members reached
0mangroves planted with the Forest Department
0prototypes designed, built and tested
0native pollinator plants in the garden
0of waste pulled from a tidal canal
0species documented on Bali Island

The deepest change doesn't fit in a table. Women who barely spoke in a circle of seven stood in front of their village. Some earned money of their own for the first time. And they kept coming to the nursery at seven in the morning, because they had decided to.

What's next

The pilot wasn't the destination

sustain

Keep the roots alive

Monitor the planted mangroves through their first year, grow the new Sundari nursery, and help the women's ideas become livelihoods.

replicate

More pods, more islands

Ten more women on Bali have asked to join a second cohort. Next comes 2–3 new pods across the Sundarbans, learning which parts of the model travel.

grow

Build WOCAL

Turn WOCAL into an organisation, so this doesn't end with one cohort or depend on one person.

Simran Sinha holding a small rescued bird in her cupped hands.
A note from the founder

Four years ago I decided to quit my corporate career and follow a lifelong calling: wildlife conservation. This took me to remote, biodiverse landscapes working alongside local communities which completely shifted my perception. It was clear that conservation was a way of life rooted in interdependence, daily interactions and ancestral wisdom.

Women are central to this story: weaving together family, community, and environment through often invisible acts of care - already practicing the kind of conservation the world urgently needs. My work is deeply inspired by the women in my own life, who often placed their own dreams on hold, whose strength and boundless capacity to care taught me resilience long before I had the language for it.

WOCAL exists to ensure that women's local leadership is no longer treated as an afterthought, but recognized as the foundational strategy for healing our shared home.

Simran SinhaFounder, WOCAL

With support from
  • Women for ConservationSeed grant for the Mangrove Lab
  • Sundarbans Forest DepartmentSTR West Range
  • Community Conservation Inc.
  • DISHA NGOBali Island
Get in touch

Help the next pod take root

If you fund, research or practise community-led conservation, mangrove restoration, or women's environmental leadership, we'd love to talk.

Email Simran → Ask for the pilot report @wocalbiodiversity

“The future of conservation is diverse, inclusive, and led by those who care.”