AMCO – African Marine Conservation Organisation

AMCO’s overall objective is to reduce the main threats to aquatic wildlife and their habitats while improving local communities’ living conditions, through:

• strengthening collaborative synergies among marine and coastal environmental actors
• improving knowledge of aquatic wildlife population dynamics
• supporting climate change mitigation and coastal community resilience to economic vulnerabilities
• promoting effective enforcement of regulations on aquatic wildlife and habitat
• strengthening AMCO’s own structure and governance.

AMCO was born from founder Dr Aristide Kamla’s master’s research at Lake Ossa, where he studied the African manatee and found a species severely threatened by poaching, with no local organisation working to protect it.

Determined to act rather than remain a bystander, he founded an organisation to mobilise the human, technical and financial resources needed to conserve the Lake Ossa manatee population.

Since 2014, AMCO has broadened its scope beyond the species itself to also tackle the growing habitat degradation driven by rising human pressure and urbanisation.