The woman who was told coral was not her work

Before 2023, Omar had never gone more than a few metres under. Snorkelling was the limit of it — the bright shallow world, the surface always within reach. To join the coral restoration team of the Oceans Without Borders programme, a partnership between Wild Impact and &Beyond, she had to learn scuba diving, how to skipper a boat, and how to weld and shape metal.

The welding is not incidental. The structures she plants coral onto are Reef Stars, hexagonal steel frames coated in sand and resin, part of a system developed by Mars Incorporated and first deployed at scale off South Sulawesi in Indonesia. Each frame carries around 15 to 18 coral fragments. Wired together into continuous webs across beds of rubble, they stop the loose fragments shifting and smothering whatever tries to grow. At Mnemba the frames are fabricated locally, which is why a marine ranger there learns metalwork alongside diving.

The reef needed them. In early 2024 the water around the island reached 31°C at 30 metres depth, and the bleaching that followed killed a substantial share of the coral on Mnemba's reefs. Since a training milestone in November 2025, 101 Reef Stars have gone down inside the marine special area. Monitoring through 2026 has recorded coral recruiting naturally again, and soft coral colonising several of the structures.

Mnemba is small — roughly 500 metres across, three kilometres off the northeast coast of Unguja — but the reef system ringing it runs about seven kilometres by four, and the conservation area around it covers 2,130 hectares. The restoration work has continued there since 2018.

Omar is a wife and mother of two; her husband rides a motorcycle for a living. In September she will run the Wildlife Ranger Challenge, a 21-kilometre race organised by the British charity Tusk, which participants complete carrying 22 kilograms of kit. The event was created in 2020, when tourism collapsed and ranger salaries across Africa went unpaid. It has always leaned towards the anti-poaching units of the savannah. This time one of the runners will have spent her year underwater.