Just like last year a group of 4 students from the TU Delft traveled to lombok to work on a project on behalf of IBF. Read more about this group and their project.
Our team consists of four bachelor students from TU Delft. Steef and Coosje are both fourth year Civil Engineering students, Quirine is a TPM student and I (Imke) am an Architecture student. As you can see we are a quite diverse group which benefits our project work.
The scope
The original mission of our project was to create sustainable funding for IBF by launching a sustainable diving experience for tourists. To sell this product successfully, we would create at least 4 partnerships between IBF and the local businesses of Lombok Utura. By October next year IBF would be able to cover all its expenses including the salary of 5 employees.
Main insights
After many in-person conversations with Andre, our project provider and founder of IBF, we came to the conclusion that having 5 employees for IBF is not necessarily the main focus. IBF is still a rather small organisation, as it is only 2 years old, and their goal is not to grow their company immensely to restore a bigger amount of corals, because if ocean temperatures keep rising all corals will die either way, regardless of the amount of restored corals by IBF. That is why their goal is to do conservation work from A to Z. Raise awareness among the local community, teach them how important the ocean ecosystem is for their livelihood, promote switching to sustainable fishing and fight for governmental support.
IBF also wants to increase the number of conscious travellers – those who care about the locals whose home and environment they visit. Being a responsible tourist is to actually make a place better than when you arrived. Lombok is a growing tourism destination in Indonesia, so IBF wants to keep it as beautiful as possible and one of the tools is to join conservation work. Hopefully, future tourism in Lombok will adopt this concept of quality tourism instead of mass tourism.
That is also where our Restorative Dives come into the picture. This new product will make it possible for ocean enthusiasts visiting Lombok to enjoy diving while also getting involved in conservation work.
By launching this new way of income for IBF, the goal is to be able to provide one full-time salary for a possible successor for Andre. Andre is getting more and more occupied with leading marine conservation projects for the Indonesian Government and attending conferences about sustainability. That’s why he wants to take a step back from his position as a CEO of IBF and find a suitable new person for that position. We will keep our ears open at eco flea markets we will attend to help him scout the perfect successor.
The progress
In the past month here we have been busy with the preparations of the launch of the Restorative Dive. We received our PADI diver certificate and we experienced the first restorative dive ourselves where we assigned spider-constructions to their donors and planted coral fragments on them. We made flyers for the new product and we are updating the website of IBF. We also visited local businesses to promote our dive by giving them a bunch of our flyers and talking about how we could help each other, business to business. Furthermore, we also partnered with a local artist who created a mural on the wall of the coral lab to get people’s attention for the lab. Soon, there will be an infoboard placed next to the lab to explain the importance of IBF in English and in Bahasa Indonesian.
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