BACoMaB Trust Fund — Banc d'Arguin Coastal & Marine Biodiversity Endowment (Mauritania)

The BACoMaB Trust Fund (Fondation Banc d'Arguin et de la Biodiversité Côtière et Marine) is a perpetual conservation endowment established in 2009 to secure long-term financing for Mauritania's coastal and marine protected areas, chiefly the Banc d'Arguin National Park (PNBA), Diawling National Park and the Cap Blanc / Monk Seal Reserve. It was capitalised by the Mauritanian government (using revenue mobilised from the EU-Mauritania fisheries agreement), Germany's KfW development bank, the French Development Agency (AFD), the French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM) and the MAVA Foundation, and is structured as a charitable foundation under English law with a public-service mandate recognised by the Mauritanian state.

The fund spends only investment income, preserving its capital in perpetuity; its original capitalisation target was €35 million by 2016. In 2024 alone, BACoMaB disbursed €840,000 in grants across its three sites — €530,000 to PNBA (including €150,000 toward a new surveillance vessel), €190,000 to Diawling National Park, and €120,000 to the Monk Seal Conservation Programme. That funding supported 528 maritime surveillance patrols totalling 2,571 hours, which intercepted 259 canoes and five larger vessels fishing illegally inside the park, and underpinned a 2024 monk seal breeding season that produced 44 recorded pups.

Beyond core grant-making, BACoMaB co-financed a blue-carbon valorisation initiative with the BRIDGE Project Innovation Fund, formally launched in September 2024, though this workstream remains at an early, unevidenced stage relative to the fund's established marine-surveillance and species-monitoring record. Governance runs through an independent board overseeing the three protected-area sites, with results published annually.

As a caveat, BACoMaB funds protected-area management and anti-poaching enforcement rather than paying individual resource users directly for ecosystem services, so it functions more as a conservation trust fund than a classic PES transaction; its long operating history since 2009 and published annual metrics nonetheless make it one of the more transparently evidenced marine-conservation financing mechanisms in West Africa.

Read more: https://cafeconsortium.org/bacomab-trust-fund-2024-summary/

Read the full analysis: https://cafeconsortium.org/bacomab-trust-fund-2024-summary/