Blue Economy
Stakeholders, Industry Leaders Tip Women to Drive Africa’s $300bn Blue Economy at WISTA Regional Conference
Stakeholders, Industry Leaders Tip Women to Drive Africa’s $300bn Blue Economy at WISTA Regional Conference
By Ighoyota Onaibre | Waterways News
The Federal Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Dr Adegboyega Oyetola, and leading maritime stakeholders have called on women to take the lead in translating Africa’s blue economy policies into concrete economic outcomes, describing female inclusion as a strategic imperative rather than a peripheral agenda item.
The call came at the two-day Regional Conference of the Women in Shipping and Trading Association (WISTA) Nigeria, held in Lagos on Friday. The event, themed “From Policy to Implementation: Women Advancing Africa’s Blue Economy through Sustainable Shipping, Trade and Energy Innovation,” attracted policymakers, regulators and maritime professionals from across Africa and beyond.
Oyetola, represented by Hajia Kaltum Ibrahim, Director of Planning, Research and Statistics at the ministry, told delegates that the sector’s enormous potential could only be realised through effective policy implementation and deeper stakeholder collaboration. He said the ministry had developed a comprehensive National Policy on Marine and Blue Economy to guide sustainable development, and stressed that strategic public-private partnerships remained critical to attracting investment, driving innovation and expanding infrastructure across the maritime value chain.
The minister urged participants to move beyond policy discussions and deliver practical outcomes, noting that sustainable growth required the active participation of women and youth across shipping, logistics, fisheries, renewable energy and marine services.
The Oniru of Iruland, Oba Abdulwasiu Lawal, described Lagos as Africa’s pre-eminent maritime gateway and an appropriate setting for such conversations. He said women’s leadership had become a business necessity, and renewed his call for the establishment of a Lagos Coastal Community Development Corporation to advance inclusive coastal development.
Delivering the keynote address, former NIMASA Director-General Dr Dakuku Peterside identified poor implementation — not inadequate policy — as Africa’s overriding maritime challenge. He said frameworks such as the African Maritime Transport Charter and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) had yet to translate into improved port efficiency, fleet growth or stronger intra-African trade.
Peterside drew a sharp contrast between Morocco’s average vessel turnaround time of two days and Nigeria’s minimum of seven days, warning that port inefficiencies drive up business costs and erode competitiveness. He called on African states to leverage the global net-zero transition to attract green finance, develop local shipbuilding capacity, modernise ports and build efficient logistics corridors.
“Signature is not a shipyard. Convention is not capacity. Policy is not fleet. If we sign without building, we become spectators,” he said.
NIMASA Director-General Dr Dayo Mobereola said Africa’s blue economy, valued at more than $300 billion annually, could not reach its full potential without greater gender inclusion. He noted that while maritime transport accounts for around 90 per cent of global trade by volume, women represent only 29 per cent of the global maritime workforce and under two per cent of seafarers. He urged governments and industry operators to prioritise human capital development, institutional reforms and innovation.
Lagos State House of Assembly Deputy Speaker, Hon. Mojisola Meranda, citing the 2024 IMO-WISTA Survey, said women constitute less than 19 per cent of the global maritime workforce and only one per cent of seafarers worldwide. She called for sustained investment in training, mentorship, financing and policy frameworks to expand women’s access to both leadership and technical roles.
A former WISTA Nigeria President, Chief Jean Anishere, advocated harmonised environmental and port regulations across Africa to reduce compliance costs and attract investment, while also pushing for policies supporting shore power facilities, alternative fuel bunkering and smart port technologies.
WISTA Nigeria President Dr Odunayo Ani noted that the association, the first national WISTA body on the African continent, now 32 years old — had consistently championed mentorship, advocacy and professional development. She said the establishment of the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy reflected Nigeria’s commitment to harnessing its marine resources for economic growth and job creation.
Nigeria Watch
The WISTA Lagos conference has surfaced a tension that Waterways News has long observed in Nigeria’s maritime governance: the gap between policy ambition and operational reality. Dr Peterside’s remarks about Morocco’s two-day turnaround against Nigeria’s seven-day minimum were blunt and accurate. This is not a new finding as it has been documented in every competitiveness audit of Nigerian ports for the better part of a decade, but the fact that it is being restated at a flagship sectoral conference in 2026 is itself instructive.
Nigeria’s port dwell times remain a structural handicap. The Electronic Call-Up System at Apapa has improved gate management but has not fundamentally resolved cargo clearance bottlenecks driven by multiple agency overlaps, demurrage disputes and the persistent harassment of transporters along the corridor. Until those systemic issues are resolved, the blue economy framework risks becoming another layer of policy architecture built atop an unreformed port system.
The gender data presented by NIMASA DG Mobereola and Deputy Speaker Meranda, to the effect that less than two per cent of global seafarers are women, and even one per cent in some surveys, is striking but not entirely surprising in Nigeria’s context. The country’s seafarer pipeline faces structural constraints that affect male and female candidates alike: the cost of STCW certification, gaps in flag state examination access outside Lagos, and the unresolved CVFF disbursement machinery that was meant to build Nigerian tonnage and crew capacity. Any serious programme to advance women’s participation in Nigerian shipping must address these bottlenecks head-on, not simply as gender-specific barriers but as systemic failures.
What WISTA Nigeria has done well for 32 years is maintain institutional continuity and professional visibility for women in a sector that has not always made space for them. The conference’s convening power of bringing regulators, royalty and international maritime professionals to Lagos, is its own form of soft influence. The harder question, which Peterside posed directly, is what happens between now and the next conference. That answer will be found not in Lagos conference halls but in port offices, seafarer training centres, cabotage implementation desks and the corridors of the Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy.
Waterways News | www.waterwaysnews.ng
Blue Economy
Water Transport Operators Push For Recognition At The Table As FTAN Demands Tourism Policy Reforms
Water Transport Operators Push For Recognition At The Table As FTAN Demands Tourism Policy Reforms
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
Nigeria’s tourism sector needs urgent policy reform, stronger collaboration and fresh investment to compete globally and water transport operators who are members of the Federation of Tourism Associations of Nigeria (FTAN) want that conversation to include the boats, ferries and waterway routes that move millions of Nigerians and could move even more tourists.
That was the underlying idea raised by Comrade Babatope Fajemirokun National President of Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN) represented by Chief Raymond Gold, National PRO of WABOTAN, at the ninth Nigeria Tourism Investors Forum and Exhibition (NTIFE), held over two days in Abuja under the theme “Tourism Transformation Through Collaboration, Policy Alignment and Investment.” The events took place between Thursday 30 to Friday 31 of July 2026. Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN), is a corporate member of FTAN
The forum drew policymakers, investors, tourism operators and development partners.
FTAN President Dr Aliyu Badaki used his welcome remarks to press the Federal Government to overhaul tourism-related laws and regulatory frameworks that he said breed duplication, institutional conflict and legal uncertainty for operators. He said the federation’s newly developed Tourism Transformation Mandate (TTM) is meant to unify every segment of the tourism value chain.
Babatope Fajemirokun, through Chief Gold emphasizes the fact that this value chain for Nigeria’s coastal cities, riverine communities and inland waterway corridors, runs directly through water transport.
Badaki argued that fragmented efforts and weak coordination have held back the sector for years, and called for regulation that enables rather than inhibits growth.
Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, who declared the forum open, described tourism as a strategic pillar for economic diversification. She said government cannot finance tourism transformation alone and that private capital must lead, with government’s role limited to creating an enabling environment for investors.
In his keynote address, Sen. Ibrahim Ida called for stronger collaboration among government, the private sector and host communities, saying tourism can generate jobs, foreign exchange and diversification if properly harnessed.
Panel sessions, moderated by Justina Ovat of Calabar Hospitality House Limited, featured Nigeria Tourism Development Authority (NTDA) Director-General Dr Ola Awakan, who called for policy consistency and investor-friendly incentives, and Dr Philip Maga of the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism (NIHOTOUR), who flagged the need for stronger workforce training to close skills gaps across the hospitality industry.
Hospitality entrepreneur Lanre Balogun urged investors to prioritise disciplined, long-term planning.
Nigeria Watch
For Nigeria’s water transport sector, NTIFE’s reform push is not a side conversation. Rather, it is a direct stakeholder issue. FTAN’s corporate membership includes Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN) and the Association of Tourist Boat Operators and Water Transporters of Nigeria (ATBOWATON), both drawn from the ranks of operators who run the boats, ferries and water taxis that already serve Lagos’s creeks, the Niger Delta’s riverine towns and coastal leisure routes. Their presence inside FTAN means the federation’s demand for regulatory clarity and coordinated policy carries an inland-waterways and blue-economy dimension that goes beyond hotels and heritage sites.
That matters because water tourism sits at an awkward regulatory junction in Nigeria. A tourist boat operator answers not only to tourism authorities but potentially to NIWA, LASWA (in Lagos) and NIMASA on safety standards, and state government tourism boards, precisely the kind of overlapping jurisdiction Badaki described as breeding “duplication, institutional conflicts… and operational uncertainty.”
The 2026 Supreme Court ruling affirming NIWA’s regulatory authority over inland waterways nationwide, following the NIWA-LASWA jurisdictional dispute, is a live example of the kind of institutional friction FTAN’s Tourism Transformation Mandate is meant to resolve, at least on the tourism side.
Musawa’s call for private capital to lead tourism investment also lands squarely on water transport operators’ desks. Vessel acquisition, safety retrofitting, jetty infrastructure and life-jacket compliance all require capital that small-scale operators, including WABOTAN’s member-cooperative structure, have struggled to access, a gap that echoes the long-running CVFF disbursement failure in the cabotage shipping sector and underscores why financing bottlenecks are not unique to cargo and passenger shipping alone.
If FTAN’s push for policy alignment succeeds in drawing water transport formally into Nigeria’s tourism investment architecture, operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON could gain a stronger claim to inclusion in infrastructure programmes such as the Omi-Eko electric ferry project and LASWA’s ferry safety development initiatives, turning routine commuter water transport into a recognised leisure and tourism asset, not just a transportation afterthought.
For a sector accustomed to being regulated but rarely consulted, this call by Babatope Fajemirokun is a modest but meaningful call.
Blue Economy
NIMASA Deepens Seafarer Welfare Push, Signs Off Renewed Mission to Seafarers Collaboration
NIMASA Deepens Seafarer Welfare Push, Signs Off Renewed Mission to Seafarers Collaboration
By Ighoyota Onaibre | Waterways News
The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has restated its commitment to improving the welfare of Nigerian seafarers, pledging deeper collaboration with the Mission to Seafarers (MtS) as part of ongoing reforms in the sector.
The commitment came as the Director-General, Dr Dayo Mobereola, received a delegation from the Mission to Seafarers at the agency’s Lagos headquarters, led by the Chairman of MtS Lagos, Chief Adebayo Sarumi, alongside the Regional Director for Africa, Reverend Cedric Rautenbach.
Speaking on behalf of the DG, NIMASA’s Executive Director for Operations, Engr. Fatai Taiye Adeyemi, said the agency would continue tightening certification processes, expanding capacity development programmes, and strengthening welfare policies for seafarers both at sea and in port, in partnership with stakeholders such as the Mission to Seafarers.
Chief Sarumi commended NIMASA’s ongoing reforms and expressed confidence that closer collaboration would translate into tangible welfare gains for Nigerian maritime professionals. Reverend Rautenbach, for his part, clarified that while the Mission to Seafarers and Nigeria’s Port Welfare Committees pursue a shared objective which is the the wellbeing of seafarers. The two bodies operate on distinct, complementary mandates, making coordination between them essential to strengthening on-ground support at Nigerian ports.
The meeting covered decent working conditions, welfare service gaps, and areas of mutual collaboration. NIMASA said the engagement aligns with its obligations under the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) 2006, and forms part of a broader push toward stronger regulatory oversight and stakeholder engagement on seafarer rights.
Nigeria Watch
Beyond the courtesy-visit optics, this meeting lands on a fault line that has dogged Nigerian seafarer welfare for years: fragmented institutional responsibility. NIMASA regulates and certifies; Port Welfare Committees are meant to deliver frontline services at berths; the Mission to Seafarers, a faith-based international NGO, fills gaps neither statutory body always reaches. These gaps are chaplaincy, shore leave support, emergency assistance, and advocacy for stranded or abandoned crew.
Rautenbach’s point about “distinct but complementary mandates” is worth pressing on, because in practice that distinction has often meant duplication in some areas and total absence in others.
Nigerian seafarers have long reported patchy access to welfare facilities at ports like Apapa, Tin Can Island, and Onne. Such reports include inconsistent internet access, poor rest facilities, and slow response to cases of wage default or abandonment by errant shipowners, issues MWUN has repeatedly raised in past CBA compliance disputes.
NIMASA’s MLC 2006 framing is the right one, but enforcement, not policy language, remains the industry’s persistent complaint. If this renewed MtS partnership is to mean more than another photo-op at headquarters, it should translate into a documented, port-by-port welfare service map: which ports have functioning seafarer centres, which Port Welfare Committees are actually active, and where the Mission to Seafarers’ Flying Angel network is present versus where seafarers are effectively on their own.
Nigerian crews calling at their own national ports deserve better than welfare support that depends on which NGO happens to be in town.
NIMASA Bets on Youths to Power Nigeria’s Blue Giant Ambitions
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has restated that the country’s push to become Africa’s “Blue Giant” will rise or fall on how well it equips young Nigerians for the blue economy, with the agency’s Director-General, Dr Dayo Mobereola, describing youth capacity-building as the engine room of the National Marine and Blue Economy Policy.
Mobereola made the point at the 10th Taiwo Afolabi Annual Maritime (TAAM) Lecture at the University of Lagos, where he was represented by NIMASA’s Director of Reforms Coordination and Blue Economy, Mrs Nneka Obianyor. He linked the agency’s youth agenda directly to President Bola Tinubu’s economic diversification drive, noting that the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Adegboyega Oyetola, has directed NIMASA to prioritise skills development and job creation for young Nigerians in the sector.
Director-General of NIMASA, Dr. Dayo Mobereola
To back that up, Mobereola pointed to a cluster of NIMASA programmes already running: the long-standing Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP), a newly launched Blue Economy Accelerator Initiative, skills acquisition centres spread across the six geopolitical zones, and the rollout of Institutes of Maritime Studies in select Nigerian universities. He framed these as deliberate interventions meant to build capacity, generate employment, and spur innovation among the country’s youth population.
Separately, NIMASA used the UNILAG engagement to go beyond ceremony, running an interactive session with doctoral and master’s students on shipping development, maritime logistics, cabotage implementation, and maritime labour regulation. The session was led by the agency’s Director of Cabotage Services, Ms Gloria Anyasodo, and was pitched as part of a broader effort to strengthen ties between academia and industry in tackling the maritime sector’s practical challenges.
Nigeria Watch
The optics are good; the test, as always, will be delivery. NIMASA has no shortage of youth-facing initiatives on paper. The NSDP has existed for years, skills centres have been announced before, and Institutes of Maritime Studies have been floated in past budget cycles. What’s new here is the Blue Economy Accelerator Initiative, and it arrives with the same vagueness that has dogged similar rollouts: no disclosed funding envelope, no timeline for the six geopolitical zone centres to be fully operational, and no public framework for how graduates of these programmes are absorbed into shipping, logistics, or cabotage jobs afterward.
That absorption question matters more than any lecture-hall soundbite. Nigeria’s maritime training pipeline, from MAN Oron to the seafarer certification backlog that this publication has tracked, already produces more qualified hands than the domestic fleet and port ecosystem can currently employ. This is a mismatch tied directly to the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund’s decades-long disbursement failure and the slow pace of indigenous vessel acquisition. Training more youths without fixing that bottleneck simply shifts the frustration downstream, from unemployment to underemployment.
There’s also an accountability gap in how these announcements are made. They are usually made through a lecture delegation rather than a costed policy document. If NIMASA and the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy are serious about youths driving the Blue Giant ambition, the next disclosure should include enrolment numbers, the accelerator’s funding source, and most critically, the placement data showing how many NSDP and skills-centre graduates have actually found sea-time or shore-based maritime employment. Until then, this remains a well-intentioned promise stacked on top of several older, still-unfulfilled promises.
Oil and Gas5 months agoTantita’s Pipeline Deal: $144m Contract, Rising Output, and the Questions that Deserve Answers
- MARITIME TRADE & SHIPPING5 months ago
World’s Largest Container Ship Sets New Maritime Record with 22,233 TEUs on Single Voyage
- Blue Economy6 months ago
Nigeria’s Coast Guard Bill: A Solution in Search of a Problem?
