Fishing in this village has always been men's work. Wisye bought a boat anyway.

Wisye Sahambangung spent five years restoring mangroves on the North Sulawesi coast, most of it on instinct. Then the village government started calling.

Wisye Sahambangung has a simple explanation for why young people in her village rarely join the mangrove planting.

"To plant mangroves, you have to go down into the mud," she says. "They don't want to get dirty."

She says it without judgment and very matter of fact.

Wisye comes from Sarawet Village in North Likupang, North Sulawesi, Indonesia and she travelled to the Women Deliver 2026 conference in Melbourne as part of the CARE delegation.

Speaking through an interpreter, her answers moving from Bahasa Indonesia into English, she has the calm, steady presence of someone who has been doing hard work long enough that she no longer needs to explain its importance. She's warm and easy to laugh, but the weight of what she's built is clear from the first few minutes.

"I am a fisherwoman, and I am the chairwoman of a women-led economic group called Rhizopora," she says.

Rhizopora started as a village welfare group focused on family and domestic life. When funding for women's economic activity arrived, Wisye took the chairmanship and turned the group into something else entirely. The women took out community loans to buy their own boats and moved from the domestic sphere into the water.

The women of Rhizopora now fish together, earn together, and restore mangroves together, with the latter being crucial. Mangroves hold up the entire village economy.

"Mangroves are essential for our livelihood," she says. "Most people in the village live from the sea, from fish and crabs. The more mangroves there are, the more fish and crabs can be found. If the mangroves are not there, we have to swim further out to sea to find fish."

Distance is danger in open water, so a healthy mangrove forest keeps food, income, and safety close to shore. Scientists describe mangroves as some of the most effective carbon stores on the planet, as nurseries for fish stocks, and as barriers against storm surge. Wisye talks about crabs, because that's where climate change lands when it's your dinner and your children's school fees.

Wisye in the mangroves. Photo source: CARE Indonesia

The women no one was counting

In North Likupang, fishing belongs to men.

"In our area, fisherwomen are rarely found, because most fishers are men," she says. "It is only us, in Sarawet Village, who work as fisherwomen."

This is deliberate. The project sought out the women who fish, then built the group around them.

In a place where a woman on the water is an anomaly, Rhizopora made them a collective.

Wisye has restored mangroves for five years, and for most of that time she did it on instinct.

"The mangrove restoration has been running for about five years, but we only joined Yayasan Care Peduli Indonesia last year," she says. "They guided us on how to plant mangroves, how to care for them, how to find good seedlings. We were also given gender training, leadership training, and financial management training."

The detail about care matters, because most restoration fails right there. Wisye says people plant mangroves for the photo, then leave, and the dead seedlings stand in for the result. Rhizopora learned to choose strong seedlings, plant them well, then return to check on them season after season.

Environmental work without economic power asks women to volunteer their labour, while economic power without environmental work leaves the resource base to collapse. Rhizopora holds both at once, and the women hold both in their own names.

Photo source: CARE Indonesia

Then the invitations started

Asked what she'd tell the world if she had its attention, Wisye asks for recognition.

"What I want to say is that women, especially fisherwomen and women in coastal areas, need to be appreciated and valued," she says. "Women are also important in protecting the environment."

It's a small word for something that took five years to earn.

Asked about the biggest change of the past five years, she names two things.

"The mangroves are growing better and better," she says. "And we receive more attention from the community, and even from the government."

Her voice is being heard, she confirms. "We are even invited to every government event, even at the sub-district level, to promote the women who are brave enough to restore the mangroves."

Change at this scale looks like a seat at the village meeting that didn't exist a year ago.

Recognition is a currency, and for women doing essential, unglamorous work, it's often the first currency they're ever paid in.

Wisye's story points to a wider pattern. The people doing the most direct work on climate adaptation are very often women in places few headlines reach, working in conditions most of us would refuse, with little credit and less money. Global climate finance still struggles to reach the community level, and even less of it reaches women's groups. Meanwhile, a women's collective in Sarawet plants and monitors a coastal defence system by hand, in the mud, season after season.

The mud is the point

Asked what she wants young women to know, she answers for all young people, and her voice lifts as she does.

"What young people can learn from us is our spirit to protect the environment, especially the mangroves," she says. "Most young people no longer want to pay attention to the environment. To plant mangroves, you have to go down into the mud. They don't want to get dirty."

When Women Deliver packed away its lanyards, Wisye flew home to Sarawet. The tide pulls back twice a day there, and somewhere along that coastline, a group of fisherwomen climbs down into the mud and gets to work.