The 'Sisterhood' Restoring Indonesia's Coral Reefs: Inside Coral Catch
A diver works at a coral reef nursery. Coral restoration needs long-term local stewardship — the exact gap Coral Catch was founded to fill. Image: Mitchell Tartt / NOAA (public domain).
On Gili Air, a nonprofit called Coral Catch is training Indonesian women as reef conservationists — and treating coral restoration as a workforce problem, not just a conservation one.
On the tiny Indonesian island of Gili Air, a different kind of dive program is running — and it's not teaching tourists. Since 2021, a nonprofit called Coral Catch has been training local women to become the next generation of reef conservationists.
It's Indonesia's first marine conservation training program designed specifically for women, and it was born from a simple observation: many women who live beside the ocean have never had the chance to swim, dive, or build a career around the sea.
Why women, why now
"In Indonesia, many women living close to the ocean had never been given the opportunity to swim, dive or envision careers linked to marine science and conservation," says Rose Huizenga, the Dutch founder of Coral Catch. "At the same time, reef restoration efforts often struggle to create long-term local stewardship and ownership."
Huizenga arrived on Gili Air for a sabbatical and never left. What she saw was a reef restoration sector that depends heavily on foreign experts, short-term grants and volunteer labour — and, as a result, projects that quietly fade. One global review found that in 60% of coral restoration case studies, restored sites were monitored for less than 18 months.
Coral Catch's answer was to treat reef restoration not just as a conservation problem, but as a workforce problem.
Inside the nine-week program
The core of Coral Catch is a nine-week restoration scholarship for Indonesian women. It's hands-on from day one:
- Building reef restoration structures from bent steel
- Monitoring how corals grow on those structures over time
- Running beach clean-ups
- Teaching local children to care about their reef
Cohort graduates have gone on to careers and degrees in conservation and diving. For many, it's their first open-water experience — and their first real sense that a marine career is possible.
Gabriela Nathania H joined in 2022 and remembers diving with four strangers from across the archipelago. "We were girls from all over Indonesia with different backgrounds, but on the dive, we adjusted to each other, helped each other, became a family," she recalls.
From a course to a career pathway
In early 2026, Coral Catch expanded beyond the scholarship: it launched an academy to support graduates through their early careers, plus a mobile version of its conservation curriculum. The goal is to move from one-off training to a lasting pipeline of local stewardship — women who stay, monitor their own reefs, and lead restoration for the long term.
For divers who love Indonesia's reefs, that's worth paying attention to. The future of places like the Gili Islands depends less on outside experts than on the people who live there — and increasingly, on the women Coral Catch is training.
Diving Indonesia soon? Read our destination guides and plan a trip that supports local conservation.
Written by GeckoDive Team
The official GeckoDive team sharing diving knowledge, gear reviews, and destination guides.