A Wall That Tells a Bigger Story
Outside the Vanga Blue Forest office on Kenya’s south coast, a colourful mural stretches across a once plain wall. It celebrates mangrove forests, coastal livelihoods and the people who depend on them. Children pass it on their way to school, fishers stop to study familiar scenes, and visitors pause to take photographs.
Look closer and the mural becomes more than public art. It shows how blue carbon finance flows through the project, how revenue is shared, and what the community share supports, from education and healthcare to water, livelihoods and conservation. The figures are intended to be updated each year, turning the wall into a public record that residents can return to, question and compare over time. Just as importantly, the mural was co-created: over eight days, community members, scientists, artists, project staff and schoolchildren revised everything from fishing gear and clothing to buildings and classroom text.
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From Namibia to Kenya
Blue carbon projects rely on more than robust science. Long-term legitimacy also depends on whether people understand the project, trust its processes and believe that benefits are being shared fairly.
In Vanga, the team tested a simple idea: could communication become part of project governance, making benefit sharing easier to understand, question and verify?
The answer took shape on a wall, but the method behind it had been developing for several years.
The approach grew out of GRID-Arendal’s Waves of Change Initiative, part of the NIMPA+ project in Namibia, where participatory murals were developed with coastal communities, local artists and conservation practitioners. An early lesson was that inviting people to paint a prepared image was not necessarily participatory. The process became more useful when residents could question the story, correct the content and influence the design.
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In October 2025, GRID-Arendal began working with Kenya Marine & Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI), Vanga Blue Forest, Mikoko Pamoja and local residents to test whether the approach could also support transparency in a community-led blue carbon project. Rather than arriving with a design, the group began with two questions: what should the mural achieve, and what information should it make public? They agreed that it should show how carbon finance flowed back into the community and what the revenue supported. Only then did design work begin. The first concept was deliberately provisional; a framework to be tested and changed.
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Listening before painting
Drawing on the first discussions in Vanga, Hasan, Art Lead at GRID-Arendal, developed the initial visual concept, while leaving it deliberately open to challenge and revision.
“My role did not fundamentally change; I was still art directing the process and helping to hold the overall visual direction together. But once the design entered the participatory process, the role became less about simply developing and defending a concept, and more about creating a framework that could be tested, questioned and shaped by others.”
The design then moved back and forth between the teams on WhatsApp. GRID-Arendal held the visual narrative, KMFRI checked the science, project teams tested ideas locally, and artist Hafidh Omari reviewed the imagery through the lens of culture and place. No single group had all the knowledge required: scientists could check the mangrove and carbon content, but local residents were better placed to spot a boat, building, item of clothing or fishing practice that did not belong.
To make the consultation more systematic, Vanga Blue Forest and Mikoko Pamoja staff used a structured questionnaire with around 20 community members. Their responses exposed details an external designer was unlikely to anticipate: some scenes were too generic, colours were wrong, fishing practices were inaccurate, and seemingly small visual choices carried significant local meaning.
For Kassim Juma Mohammed, Project Coordinator at Mikoko Pamoja, that changed the community’s role:
“Traditional awareness activities often involve workshops, meetings or presentations where information is shared with the community. The mural, however, encouraged people to become active contributors rather than just participants. Community members shared their ideas, experiences and aspirations, which were then reflected in the artwork.”
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The VR headset was useful for the design implementation involving multiple people but keeping the key design ideas intact. © Rob Barnes, GRID-Arendal
The team also used virtual reality (VR) to view proposed changes at full scale before committing them to the wall. Technology helped, but some of the most important changes still came face to face. On the first evening in Gazi, local artist Hafidh Omari began sketching directly over the latest design, adding local architecture, changing clothing and replacing generic imagery. His revisions were scanned that evening, incorporated into the artwork and circulated before painting began.
Hafidh describes the lesson more simply:
“As an artist, I learned that public art is not only about expressing your own ideas. It is also about listening. The best murals are created with the community, not just for the community.”
Once painting began, the wall became a meeting place. People gathered around it each morning: some watched, some talked, and others picked up a brush. Children stopped after school, fishers studied the scenes, and project staff moved between painting and impromptu discussion. Music played throughout the day, helping turn the site from a demonstration into a shared event.
Consultation continued as the mural took shape. One fisherman questioned whether the fishing scene accurately represented the sustainable practices promoted locally.
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Some watched, some talked, and others picked up a brush… © Rob Barnes, GRID-Arendal
Dr Jacqueline Uku, Chief Scientist at KMFRI, recalls:
“They advised on the image of the boat and the shift of the fishing gear from a net to a basket trap in order to demonstrate sustainable fishing. Another change was the text on the blackboard behind the student.”
Small corrections like these mattered. A mural intended to build trust could quickly undermine it if local people saw inaccurate fishing practices, architecture or other details on the wall.
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For a few hours each afternoon, the wall became an outdoor classroom. © Rob Barnes, GRID-Arendal
When the wall became a meeting place
For a few hours each afternoon, the wall became an outdoor classroom.
The exchange also challenged the idea that communication capacity building flows in one direction. Scientists learned from artists and residents, while the communications team learned from scientific and local practitioners.
Digital tools helped the team act quickly on feedback. Each evening, photographs of the day’s work were incorporated into the digital design, revisions made overnight, and the updated version reviewed in VR before painting resumed. This allowed late changes without losing the overall visual direction.
For Hasan, moving away from the original concept became a measure of success:
“The strongest outcome is not necessarily the one that stays closest to the first sketch. It is the one that best reflects the people, knowledge and context it is meant to represent.”
The process remained open even when the mural was almost complete. On the final day, the Association for Coastal Ecosystem Services (ACES), which supports coordination of the Vanga Blue Forest and Mikoko Pamoja carbon projects and brokers the sale of their carbon credits, reviewed how benefit sharing and financial flows were represented. Its feedback led to a final adjustment to the mural.
The change highlighted the value of bringing different forms of expertise into the process: community members and Hafidh strengthened cultural accuracy, KMFRI checked the science, and ACES checked the representation of project governance and finance. Each could spot problems the others might miss.
The wall also became a place for different kinds of knowledge to meet. Scientists shared their expertise, while artists and residents brought local knowledge and experience to the work. For younger residents in particular, painting became an opportunity to ask questions about mangroves, wildlife, fishing and conservation.
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Making benefit sharing visible
By the final day, the mural did more than depict mangroves, fishing, education and community life. It also showed how revenue from blue carbon credits moved through the project, what share supported community benefits, and where those funds were invested.
These arrangements can be difficult to understand from project reports, legal agreements and certification documents alone. By putting the basic financial model on a public wall, and updating the figures as revenue is received, the project aims to make benefit sharing easier for residents to see, question and follow over time
For Steven Lutz, Senior Blue Carbon Advisor at GRID-Arendal, that visibility is the point:
“The mural turns benefit sharing from a narrative claim into a visible metric. It shows how finance flows, what share supports local priorities, and how figures change over time. That makes accountability easier to understand, question and verify.”
A mural cannot prove that benefits are fair, nor can it replace project accounts, independent verification or effective grievance mechanisms. Making information visible is only the first step: accountability also depends on who keeps it accurate, how changes are explained and what happens when residents question it.
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For Meali Mohamed Maulem, Project Coordinator at Vanga Blue Forest, putting the information in a public space turns transparency into a visible commitment:
“It’s a public commitment, painted in colour, that says this is not a black box. This is your forest, your credits, your benefits, and you have a right to see the whole chain.”
But visibility alone does not create trust. Its value depends on a continuing process in which communities can ask questions, challenge information and see how their input is reflected.
Amber Baker, Assistant Director at ACES, connects that accessibility directly to project integrity:
“The use of visual media supports the balance of the inherent complexity of carbon projects, increasing accessibility for those unfamiliar with carbon projects and markets, and the variety of literacy levels in the communities where we work.”
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The mural does not remove the complexity of a carbon project, but it gives people a shared reference point for discussing it. In that narrower sense, participatory communication can help reduce social risks by identifying misunderstandings early, making commitments more visible and creating opportunities to question how benefits are shared. For buyers and investors, that may provide stronger evidence of engagement and transparency, but it is not a substitute for evidence that safeguards, financial controls and benefit-sharing arrangements are working in practice.
Vanga also showed that participation is not a formula that can simply be copied elsewhere. The mural worked because its purpose, imagery and information were negotiated locally; in another place, the medium and process may need to be different.
As Hasan puts it:
“The aim should not be to speak on behalf of communities, but to create conditions where communities can help shape how their own stories, environments and futures are represented.”
The approach is already being adapted elsewhere. GRID-Arendal and its partners plan to take the learning from Vanga back to Namibia, while Mikoko Pamoja hopes to develop a companion mural in Gazi. But the transferable idea is not the mural itself. It is a process in which communities, artists, scientists and carbon practitioners can test assumptions, share authority and make complex questions about finance, benefits and governance easier to discuss.
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As Steven puts it:
“Blue carbon projects will only be as strong as the trust around them. Vanga shows that science, community ownership, finance and communication have to be built together from the start.”
The Vanga mural is now complete, providing a permanent and publicly accessible record of how the project communicates its benefits and financial flows.
The longer-term test will be whether keeping that information visible and up to date strengthens transparency, accountability and trust.
Acknowledgements
The participatory mural in Vanga was developed through collaboration between the Vanga Blue Forest project, Mikoko Pamoja, the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI), Association for Coastal Ecosystem Services (ACES), GRID-Arendal, local artist Hafidh Omari and participating members of the Vanga community.
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