Fish Forever Philippines

I lead Rare’s country office in the Philippines, which is focused on catalyzing nationwide adoption of sustainable, community-based fisheries management driven by behavioral insights and social marketing principles. In 2013, I led the rollout of Rare’s first global initiative, Fish Forever, in the Philippines, and we are now working with over 60 municipalities. I continue to oversee the refinement of our approaches to ensuring effective governance of small-scale fisheries through science, policy, community engagement, data and financial inclusion. 

I bring strategic planning, management and communication skills developed during a previous career as a Creative Director at Grey Advertising in Manila. These skills were later channeled towards government agencies, NGOs, foundations and development programs when I helped set up Campaigns Social Response (CSR), a division focused on social marketing, advocacy, and public service communications. I graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree in Psychology.

The Philippines’ coastal waters ensure an essential source of food and income for nearly 2 million fishers and their families. However, small-scale fisheries are disaggregated across hundreds of local governments, and fishers are often unaware they are overfishing or damaging important habitats.

Fish Forever has proven that with proper training and tools, local leaders and fishers can be empowered to make science-based decisions and shift to more sustainable fishing practices. In the face of crises like climate change and COVID, our work helps ensure a more sustainable food supply and greater financial and ecological resilience in over 60 municipalities.

The program is at a tipping point with increasing requests for replication. The Elevate Prize will help us build and amplify a distance learning platform with key Fish Forever trainings and tools to reach additional users, such as government agencies, NGOs, and academic institutions in the Philippines and other countries.

We are facing an unprecedented global decline in marine fish populations in coastal waters, driven largely by overfishing and a lack of management. This has fueled a “tragedy of the commons,” where uncontrolled fishing is damaging marine habitat, reducing fish populations, and endangering the future of coastal communities around the globe. 

The Philippines’ coastal waters, home to almost ten percent of the world’s coral reefs, are a life-giving and vital natural resource for nearly 2 million small-scale fishers and their families who rely on them for income and food. Small-scale fishers catch nearly half of the country’s fish and represent 85% of the fisheries sector. However, they are among the poorest and most marginalized people in the country. The average catch per day has decreased steadily for decades, and fishers now spend more time at sea, going further and further from home, for smaller yields. 

Unregulated access and weak governance have led to unsustainable levels of fishing and the decline of fish populations and habitats. Today, climate change and the economic pressures from COVID are placing these fragile ecosystems in even more danger. The collapse of coastal fisheries is an environmental problem that could lead to a humanitarian crisis. 

Fish Forever is Rare’s community-led solution to revitalize our oceans and the coastal communities that depend on them. It addresses coastal overfishing by empowering communities through clear rights, strong governance, local leadership, and participatory management that in turn protects essential fish habitat and regulates fishing activities.

Our vision is to transform the management of coastal fisheries by pairing a proven local solution, community-based management, with a unique delivery method based on behavioral insights and social marketing principles to engage and mobilize communities. Since 2013, our work in the Philippines has led to more abundant marine life and healthier coastal habitats. For the communities we serve, our work has helped ensure a more sustainable food supply, improved social equity, and greater resilience to external impacts—especially in the face of climate change and global pandemics.

We now have an opportunity to scale the Fish Forever approach to additional communities in the Philippines and around the world. With support from the Elevate Prize, we will connect appropriate science and technology with specially designed training resources, tools, and technical support on a distance learning platform for use by local governments, academics, and organizations who are working with communities to address coastal overfishing. 

Fish Forever empowers local governments and marginalized coastal communities to work together to protect the habitats that sustain their fisheries and inspire fishers to adopt more responsible fishing behaviors.

Communities are at the forefront and responsible for decision-making at each stage of the Fish Forever approach:

1. Start up: We convene partners to agree on a shared vision.
2. Profiling and baselining: Community members understand the landscape through household surveys, climate change vulnerability assessments, and fisheries profiles.
3. Community engagement: Local leaders learn to facilitate discussions, introduce concepts, and build buy-in and understanding.
4. Setting up systems: We work with local leaders and fishers to develop plans that meet community and ecological needs.
5. Enabling success: We prepare the community to continue effective management of their fisheries on their own.
6. Making it last: We work with decision-makers to establish an enabling environment to sustain program gains.

For the communities we serve, our work ensures a more sustainable food supply, improved social equity, and greater resilience to external impacts–especially in the face of climate change and global pandemics. With support from MIT Solve, we can scale our approaches to reach more users, not just in the Philippines but in other Fish Forever countries around the world.

This project relates to all dimensions of the Elevate Prize but most specifically focuses on changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Fish Forever uses insights from behavioral science to motivate fishers and communities to adopt sustainable fishing practices. Fish Forever’s people-centered, participatory approach empowers local leaders and elevates the role of marginalized coastal fishers and communities who depend on nature in local decision-making and governance.   

Rare has a long history in training local conservation leaders to run ‘Pride Campaigns,’ or behavior change programs that support conservation solutions. These campaigns were applied to Marine Protected Areas here in the Philippines and were successful. But our partners came back to my team and said that, while they were doing the work of protecting their marine reserves, other fishers would come and fish around them, leaving them still poor and unable to feed their families. We realized that we needed a more comprehensive approach—one that would put the rights to fish in the hands of community members who were managing and protecting the resources. 

In 2013, I led the design and roll out the Fish Forever program in the Philippines, which balances the need for conservation with the needs of communities through rights-based co-management. This is what makes our approach different—when people believe that their actions today have an impact on their livelihoods and well-being in the future, they will be ready to make sacrifices and cooperate with one another. 

Personally, I love the ocean. My country is an archipelago, and even city-dwellers like myself have a strong connection to the sea. During my previous career in marketing and advertising, the ocean was my haven. I have been diving for over 25 years and often volunteered with ocean conservation organizations.

My job at Rare really helped bring my passions and skills together. Every day, I get to take my skills of understanding how people think, feel and behave and use them to figure out how to help vulnerable communities take care of the ocean and become more empowered and resilient in the process. Who gets to be that lucky, right?

I have always thought of myself as a translator and mediator. In my previous career, I became very good at taking a client’s brief and coming back with our take on what they need. That meant understanding the market, the consumer, the product, and the context, as well as the client. I did not realize how valuable those skills were until I joined Rare—where I take the mission (inspire change so people and nature thrive) and help shape a program that responds to a community’s needs, goals and context, while bringing in science, systems and innovations that can make the outcome more sustainable. This user-focused approach has stood me well, especially when I work with government, private sector partners, and the many experts needed to run a complex program.

As we look to scale our project across more municipalities and through more partners, I will need these skills even more, so we can recognize common challenges while highlighting shared opportunities and solutions to coastal overfishing.

While I have helped navigate our team through an earthquake, super-typhoons, and various staff challenges, perhaps this current COVID crisis makes for the best example of creating opportunities out of obstacles.  

After the first wave of crisis-response actions designed to keep our staff and partners safe, such as cutting all travel and site activities while managing donor expectations, we realized that we have a longer-term challenge to face. So much of our work depends on training and on facilitating community interaction, all of which will be greatly curtailed in a post-COVID world. 

In the last two months, we have broken down our training frameworks to identify which parts can be shifted to remote learning and are now testing different platforms; we have worked with the Stanford d.school to ideate new ways of telling stories, supporting influencers, and creating ownership in communities in a physically-distanced environment; and we have channeled staff frustration and anxiety into creative new platforms for teaching, connecting, and sharing with each other and with partners.

My leadership style has always been about facilitating and enabling others to achieve their full potential. For that reason, I measure my leadership ability in terms of what my team can do and what they enable others to do. 

A highlight of my career was the success of the National Coastal Fisheries Summit last year. This event brought together more than 500 leaders and stakeholders in the sector, including 300 mayors of coastal municipalities and more than 100 officials from national government agencies. My team designed and moderated compelling sessions with ‘champion’ mayors from Fish Forever sites paired with high-level guest panelists. The event produced a series of formal resolutions that called for specific government actions to address key themes in coastal fisheries, such as marine protected areas, sustainable financing, and climate change. 

It was a huge success. For days afterwards, our team and others still could not believe that we pulled it off. More than a year later, our program is still reaping benefits from initiating those conversations—we are a valued partner of national and local government, and together, we are advancing coastal fisheries reform in the Philippines. 

Rare is a global leader in catalyzing behavior change to achieve enduring conservation results. Fish Forever is Rare’s comprehensive solution to revitalize coastal fisheries, restore healthy coastal waters, and improve the well-being of those communities who depend on them most.

Human behavior is at the root of every major conservation and development challenge. Changing our behavior is the single most important thing we can do to ensure nature’s survival. Rare uses insights from behavioral science to motivate people and communities to adopt behaviors that benefit people and nature. We then work with partners to bring these solutions to scale. 

Fish Forever has applied this proven approach to the problem of coastal overfishing to benefit the millions of people that depend on the ocean across four continents. As one of the first Fish Forever countries, the Philippines under my leadership piloted and adapted the program to deliver a community-based approach that will ensure the health and resilience of our coastal communities and biodiversity for generations to come. 

Fish Forever’s monitoring and evaluation plan provides a results-based framework to measure milestones, outcomes and impacts of program activities in a standardized way and to support global learning and adaptation. The full M&E plan (available upon request) includes a robust set of over 60 milestones and metrics. An illustrative set of performance indicators and objectives aligned to the key activities associated with this project includes:

Key Activity 1. Establishment of networks of marine reserves

Objective 1.1 Optimized reserve placement based on best-in-class scientific guidance and participatory community workshops

Performance Indicator 1.1.1 Proportion of communities with established reserve boundaries

Performance Indicator 1.1.2 Number and size of reserves

Performance Indicator 1.1.3 Proportion of critical habitat included in fully protected areas

Key Activity 2. Ensure effective management bodies

Objective 2.1 Local management bodies established with clear goals, strategies, and capacity to develop and implement fisheries management plans

Performance Indicator 2.1.1 Proportion of communities with functioning management bodies

Performance Indicator 2.1.2 Proportion of management bodies that have developed a fisheries management plan

Key Activity 3. Encourage responsible fishing behaviors

Objective 3.1 Instilled sense of responsibility and pride amongst fishers and their communities using behavioral insights and social marketing

Performance Indicator 3.1.1 Change in knowledge, attitude, and practice around key principles of Fish Forever

Performance Indicator 3.1.2 Proportion of registered fishers

Performance Indicator 3.1.3 Proportion of fishers engaged in management decision-making

Performance Indicator 3.1.4 Proportion of fishers who report their catch

Performance Indicator 3.1.5 Proportion of fishers who comply with fishing regulations

The Fish Forever program in the Philippines currently serves 944,911 across 64 coastal municipalities. In one year, we anticipate that our reach will remain constant, as COVID-19 has delayed our plans for expansion. In five years, we estimate that our program will serve 1,400,000 people. 

In the next year, we expect to deepen our work at our current sites, recognizing that most will need to focus on COVID recovery and future-proofing against new waves of infection and disruption. We seek to help our partners understand how critical their natural resources are to food security and livelihoods, while encouraging them to adopt new and innovative solutions to meet the disruptions brought about by the pandemic. This means bringing our mayors and fishers into the spotlight, showcasing how they secured supply chains, established new ones, and ensured continuous guarding of marine protected areas. We want to highlight how working together to sustain their fisheries helped communities face the crisis bravely—for example, how fisher savings clubs enabled members to support others who were harder-hit by lost income.

We will continue to adapt our approaches, including how we train partners and engage communities so that Rare can continue to be effective in a physically-distanced environment. We plan to do this by accelerating the adoption of distance learning platforms for our formal training programs, while also incorporating a mix of context-appropriate approaches for engagement and micro-learning, such as social media, ‘old-school’ radio programs, and explainer videos or visual aids.

These pivots will set us up for scale so that we can reach greater numbers of municipalities through more partners, train more local leaders, and inspire more people, even from a distance.

Government Priorities and Programs:

The COVID pandemic is forcing a realignment of priorities all across government, and aside from the expected disruptions or delays in implementing activities, we are also starting to see some reallocation of government budgets away from activities like training, meetings, and workshops. We also expect added pressure on coastal fisheries as a result of a certain national program intended to encourage urban-to-rural returnees. 

Infrastructure:

The country’s internet infrastructure is also still quite limited, and this could also slow down efforts to shift to remote technologies.

Financial and Staffing Resources:

While our Philippines team is highly experienced and motivated, our staff are also constantly stretched, trying to balance the needs of meeting current grant deliverables and responding to new challenges. Funding uncertainty limits our ability to hire staff, and time and funding constraints sometimes prevent team members from learning new skills needed to meet fresh challenges. Most of our funding also comes from highly restricted grants that do not have as much flexibility to develop and test innovations.

Government Priorities and Programs:

We are already working with both local and national government partners to understand the impacts and opportunities of the emerging COVID response policies. We are identifying areas for alignment and leverage for coastal fisheries activities. For example, highlighting how enforcement of Marine Protected Areas can be considered a COVID response effort since it supports food security, or how fishers and protected area wardens should be considered 'frontliners' and entitled to extra benefits. We are also working with funding agencies to ensure that coastal fisheries activities are included in the categories eligible for ‘green recovery.’

Infrastructure:

While we cannot directly control infrastructure development, we are trying to understand the specific constraints our partners are working with to ensure that Rare’s proposed solutions are workable. For example, our remote learning approaches will likely include provisions for offline work, mailed materials, and other ‘lo-fi’ strategies.

Financial and Staffing Resources:

We have been working with our donors to reframe certain deliverables to conform to new realities and seeking approval for some redeployment of resources. We are also consciously trying to work smarter, so that staff are able to prioritize their time and energy more effectively. We are also bringing in support from partners that can help us learn faster. For example, the Stanford d.school helped us organize ‘design thinking sessions’ to address the new constraints that we are working under during COVID.

Our main implementing partners are local government units (LGUs), who provide staff and some financial resources to implement the program in exchange for training, coaching, and mobilization funds. This model has proven highly effective for us, since it reinforces the role of the LGUs as the entity primarily responsible for the management of coastal waters and ensures that they are able to sustain the work even after the project ends. We currently have partnership agreements with 64 coastal municipalities.  

In addition, we engage regional offices of national agencies for fisheries and for the environment, as well as provincial government units in the areas we work in. They sign on to be ‘co-delivery partners’ whose mandates are aligned with the goals of Fish Forever and who agree to support training and coaching of the LGUs in exchange for training from us for their staff.

We have also partnered with national government agencies and organizations on specific projects of interest, such as training staff from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources on behavior adoption for conservation, or working with the League of Municipalities of the Philippines to build awareness and support among the country’s 900+ coastal municipalities.

Lastly, we partner with local NGOs and academic institutions for work in specific sites or to exchange tools and resources, as well as select private companies for funding or developing and testing program innovations.  

We partner with local organizations in the places where we work to remove barriers and pave the way for community-led solutions. Rare’s approach to conservation empowers local leaders and elevates the role of fishers, farmers, and other resource users in local decision-making and governance. This community-based approach is buoyed by partnerships with officials at all levels of government—from mayors to ministers—as well as with public and private institutions, universities, non-profits, and other organizations committed to removing barriers and paving the way for community-led solutions. 

In the Philippines, Rare is building the capacity of local leaders to implement the Fish Forever approach. Our business model ultimately results in Rare being removed from the equation—we train these local leaders and provide their organizations with the tools to sustain Fish Forever over the long term. The Fish Forever principles become a way of life for communities, providing fishers and their families with sustainable livelihoods. 

As a non-governmental organization, Rare Philippines continues to operate and implement programming via charitable gifts—primarily from generous individuals, private foundations and bi- and multilateral organizations, including international development agencies. While this is Rare’s overall operating model, Fish Forever’s financial sustainability model includes transitioning from reliance on philanthropy to the inclusion of Fish Forever elements in local, regional and national planning and budgets. For example, in the Philippines, small-scale fisheries management is now a key element of the National Philippines Development Plan, meaning that budgets and programs developed over the next five years will include important approaches advocated by Fish Forever.

Rare Philippines currently operates with the generous support of private foundations such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Paradise Blue Initiative Fund. In addition, this program is currently or has been supported by international government agencies like BMU International Climate Initiative (IKI) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). A partnership with MIT Solve would amplify the work funded by these organizations and help Rare scale throughout the Philippines. 

Rare seeks additional funding in the form of grants to support scaling across the Philippines. With $300,000 in funding from MIT Solve, we will build a distance learning platform that will introduce an additional 30 municipalities to the core elements of Fish Forever. With these resources, they can begin the start-up, profiling and baselining, and community engagement phases alongside Rare, the League of Municipalities, and select provincial governments and regional agencies. 

Available upon request. 

Fish Forever has created the space for fishers, their leaders, and their communities to cooperate and shape their future together. They have seen firsthand that, with the right resources and support, they can benefit when they protect their natural resources and shift to more sustainable ways of fishing. Our government and private partners also see that this approach works. But there is so much to be done—so many areas to reach, so many people to train, and new questions to answer. And other threats like climate change and COVID underscore the urgency of our work. 

The Elevate Prize will help amplify how important this work is, and that it deserves focus and sustained commitment from funders. At the same time, the prize money will provide Rare Philippines with more flexible funding that will allow me and my team to continue innovating and adapting our approaches—not just to respond to the current pandemic, but also to set us up to train and reach more people across more geographies through remote learning and community engagement approaches. The partnership and mentoring opportunities offered by the Elevate Prize would also help us towards this goal.

I would love the opportunity to partner with organizations that specialize in learning design and training and technology for development. Our program is at a tipping point, so I am also seeking advice and mentorship on how Rare Philippines can scale effectively and efficiently for the benefit of coastal communities. 

I am most interested in partnering with the following MIT Solve partners for management and development services, mentorship and coaching, educational training, capacity building, and connection with influencers, industry leaders, and experts:

• Emerson Collective
• Future Planet Capital
• League of Intrapreneurs
• Social Capital Markets
• DBS