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Rethinking Sustainable Waterways Safety for Nigeria Inland Waterways: CVFF to the Rescue
Rethinking Sustainable Waterways Safety for Nigeria Inland Waterways: CVFF to the Rescue
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News
Advocacy groups, boat operators, and waterways safety experts are calling on the Federal Government to urgently expand the scope of the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund (CVFF) to cover small-scale private boat operators on Nigeria’s inland and coastal waterways, arguing that the $700 million fund, accumulated over two decades in NIMASA’s coffers, represents the most readily available solution to the nation’s epidemic of fatal boat mishaps.
The calls come against a backdrop of sustained mass casualties on Nigeria’s rivers and creeks. According to data from the Nigeria Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB) and various industry stakeholders, over 452 lives were lost to boat accidents between July and December 2024 alone, with industry watchdogs estimating the annual toll may be even higher than official figures reflect. The Marine Crafts Builders Association of Nigeria (MCBAN) has recorded over 3,000 boat accidents across the country in the past decade. Investigators and maritime safety experts consistently identify the same culprit: the continued operation of old, substandard, and overloaded wooden boats by private operators who lack the financial capacity to upgrade their vessels to safer, modern standards.
A report by the NSIB has found that more than two-thirds of boat accident fatalities result from drowning, with 90 per cent of victims not wearing life jackets at the time of the incidents. Over 67 per cent of recorded accidents are classified as preventable, attributed to operational inefficiencies, overloading, poor maintenance, the absence of basic safety equipment and conditions that can be directly linked to the quality of vessels in service.
“Common causes include poor operator experience, operational inefficiencies, lack of safety measures such as life-saving appliances, overloading, inadequate boat maintenance, and weak regulatory oversight,” maritime expert Captain Ahmed Hambali stated, noting that these factors highlight the need for immediate and comprehensive action to restore safety and public confidence in waterways transportation.
Nigeria’s inland waterway network spans approximately 8,600 kilometres. It is Africa’s third-longest and connects 28 of the country’s 36 states. For millions of Nigerians in riverine communities without adequate road infrastructure, water transport is not a choice but a necessity, making the quality and safety of vessels on these routes a matter of life and death.
Very recently, eleven persons perished when a wooden boat capsized on the evening of Saturday June 13, 2026. Victims were returning from a burial ceremony in Wadata, a suburb of Makurdi, to the island settlement of Daudu Dawadawa located about 25 kilometres from Makurdi city along the River Benue.
CVFF Portal Launched, But Scope Excludes Inland Operators
The Federal Government took a significant step in January 2026 when Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Dr. Adegboyega Oyetola officially launched the CVFF Application Portal at Eko Hotel and Suites in Victoria Island, Lagos, describing the occasion as a historic milestone in operationalising structured financing for indigenous ship ownership. The CVFF was established under the Coastal and Inland Shipping (Cabotage) Act of 2003 and is funded primarily through a 2% surcharge on all cabotage contracts, managed by the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA).
Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Dr. Adegboyega Oyetola (Middle), DG of NIMASA Dr Dayo Mobereola (second from left) and other guests at the official launching of the CVFF Application Portal at Eko Hotel and Suites in Victoria Island, Lagos on January 22, 2026
Under the current framework, eligible indigenous firms may access financing of up to $25 million each at competitive interest rates, through 12 appointed Primary Lending Institutions. The fund is structured as a revolving facility, meaning loan repayments will sustain future lending cycles.However, advocacy organisations and boat operators’ groups have raised concerns that the fund’s eligibility framework — designed for registered corporate shipping companies acquiring ocean-going or offshore vessels — effectively excludes the small, private boat operators who operate the passenger ferries, water taxis, and canoes that most inland Nigerians rely on.
The Sustainable Waterways Awareness Advancement and Advocacy Organisation (SWAAADO) has noted in a recent research report that inland ferry services and coastal mass transportation fall within the mandate of the CVFF, with the Act’s provisions supporting the inclusion of local boat operators under the scheme. SWAAADO’s Head of Desk, Corporate Communication and Strategy, Chief Gold Raymond, has stated that with inflows into the CVFF valued at around $700 million, its proper deployment could substantially address the vessel quality crisis on Nigeria’s inland waterways.
National President of Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN), Comrade Tope Fajemirokun and President of Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN), Seamen/NIWA and Water Transport Branch, Comrade Sunday Avoseh at a workshop for Water Transport stakeholders recently organized by WABOTAN at Apapa, Lagos
National President of the Waterfront Boat Owners and Transporters Association of Nigeria (WABOTAN), Comrade Tope Fajemirokun, also supported calls for an amendment of the Cabotage Act to formally open the CVFF to inland boat operators.
Operators Call for Tiered Disbursement Window
Stakeholders are proposing a dedicated grassroots disbursement window within the CVFF framework, with loan sizes ranging from $100,000 to $500,000, structured over extended repayment periods at single-digit interest rates. They argue that a basic Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) business registration and operator registration with the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), the Lagos State Waterways Authority (LASWA), or the relevant State Waterway Authority should serve as the primary eligibility gateway for inland operators, replacing the complex corporate documentation requirements currently applicable to large shipowners.
Proponents note that a modern safety-compliant passenger ferry or waterbus carrying 30 to 100 passengers can be acquired for between $100,000 and $200,000 depending on specification, meaning even a modest allocation from the CVFF could place hundreds of modern vessels in private operators’ hands across the country.
NIWA itself has demonstrated the concept in practice. Among its recent fleet acquisitions is a modern 62-seater passenger boat piloted as a safer replacement for wooden canoes, alongside surveillance boats, enforcement vessels, and water ambulances. The agency recorded a 72 per cent reduction in waterway fatalities by mid-2025 compared to 2022 averages, though stakeholders caution that sustainable change requires the private operator fleet, not just government agency vessels, to be modernised.
Passengers seated inside NIWA’s 62-seater capacity modern passengers ferry boat
LASWA also demonstrated this concept in practice. In it’s first phase of the Omí Eko project, the Lagos State government through LASWA, acquired some modern 60-seater and 40-seater capacity passenger ferry boats, equipped with modern navigational gadgets, for moving citizens daily across the state waterways. These crafts are not just improving safety on the state’s waterways but also giving it a face lift as they all add positively to the look and feel of the state waterways.
Lagos State 60-seater passenger ferry boat operated by Lagos Ferry Services Company (Lagferry)
Minister Oyetola has separately called on state governments to phase out unsafe wooden boats and invest in modern vessels, warning that many old boats have become safety hazards. The House of Representatives Committee on Maritime Safety, Education, and Administration has also signalled support for NIMASA’s CVFF implementation progress, with stakeholders urging legislators to go further and amend the Cabotage Act to widen the fund’s beneficiary scope.
The CVFF fund balance, held securely at the Central Bank of Nigeria under the Single Treasury Account, was confirmed intact by NIMASA Director General Dr. Dayo Mobereola, who stated the agency would continue to manage it with the utmost responsibility.
NIGERIA WATCH: Analysis and Commentary for Nigeria’s Maritime Stakeholders
The $700 Million Question Nigeria Must Answer Before the Next Boat Goes Down
There is a conversation Nigeria keeps almost having, and then not having, every time a boat goes down. We talk about enforcement. We talk about life jackets. We talk about overloading. We talk about night travel. All of these conversations are legitimate, and some of the enforcement measures of recent years, NIWA’s water marshals, the no-life-jacket-no-boarding policy, the Water Transport Code, have produced measurable results. Fatalities dropped from over 330 annually in 2021–2022 to 92 in the first eight months of 2025. That is real progress, and it deserves acknowledgement.
But there is a conversation Nigeria seems to be overlooking. It is the conversation about the boats themselves. Not about how they are operated. Not about whether passengers are wearing life jackets. But about the fundamental, stubborn, structural reality that the vast majority of Nigeria’s inland waterway passenger transport is conducted by private operators using wooden boats that are old, under-powered, poorly maintained, and critically, unaffordable to replace. The operators running these boats, especially in the northern part of the country, are not villains. They are small entrepreneurs, community transporters, boat cooperative members, doing what they can with what they have. What they have is not enough to keep their passengers alive.This is the heart of the problem. And the solution, or at least a very significant part of it, has been sitting in an account at the Central Bank of Nigeria for the past 22 years.
Why the CVFF Must Look Downriver
The Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund was established in 2003 with a genuinely good purpose: to build indigenous capacity in Nigeria’s maritime shipping sector by providing accessible, affordable financing for Nigerian operators to acquire vessels. Twenty-two years later, $700 million has accumulated. The fund is intact. A portal has been launched. And eligible shipowners can now apply for up to $25 million each.This is all commendable. But $25 million is the financing language of ocean-going cargo ships and offshore supply vessels. It is not the language of the operator on the Benue crossing, or the water taxi owner in Badagry, or the cooperative ferry running between Onitsha and the east bank.The Cabotage Act was written looking outward, toward international shipping competitiveness, offshore oil and gas logistics, the deep sea. The inland waterway passenger transport sector was, for its drafters, probably an afterthought. Two decades later, that afterthought is the sector where Nigerians are dying by the hundreds every year, in vessels that a modest fraction of the CVFF could replace with modern, standard, safe alternatives.The mathematics are straightforward. A modern 50-to-100-seat passenger ferry with GPS, VHF communications, life jackets, fire safety equipment, and compliant freeboard costs between $150,000 and $500,000. At an average of $250,000 per vessel, a $50 million grassroots window within the CVFF, just over 7 per cent of the total fund, could finance 200 modern ferry boats in its first disbursement cycle. Run that as a revolving fund, with repayments feeding back into fresh lending, and you have a self-sustaining mechanism for progressively replacing wooden boats with modern vessels across Nigeria’s navigable inland waterways.Two hundred modern ferries in the first cycle. Four hundred after the first repayment cycle. Within a decade, the wooden boat, not abolished by regulation that cannot be enforced on a 3,000-kilometre waterway network, but made economically redundant by accessible financing, could be a relic of a more dangerous past.
A fleet of OmiBus 40-seater capacity passenger ferry boats at LASWA head office , Five Cowries Terminal Ikoyi
The Eligibility Barrier Must Come Down
For this to work, the eligibility framework must be redesigned for the sector it is trying to serve. The current CVFF guidelines, requiring corporate registration, audited financial statements, business plans of the kind that corporate shipowners commission and artisanal boat operators have never heard of, are designed for an applicant that does not look like a canoe operator in Kogi State.The gateway for a grassroots CVFF window should be registration with NIWA, LASWA, or the relevant State Waterway Authority. If an operator is licensed, registered, and known to the regulator, that is the accountability foundation on which a micro-loan can be built. Boat operators’ associations and cooperatives, WABOTAN and similar bodies, should be formally empowered as conduit institutions, aggregating applications, vouching for members, and facilitating group accountability frameworks analogous to cooperative lending models that have worked in agricultural finance.This is not reinventing the wheel. It is applying standard microfinance logic to a sector that desperately needs it.
If the Cabotage Act requires amendment to make this legally possible, then let the National Assembly act. The House of Representatives Committee on Maritime Safety has shown appetite for engagement with NIMASA on CVFF matters. A bill to expand CVFF eligibility to inland passenger transport operators, framed explicitly around waterways safety and the phase-out of wooden boats, would be difficult to oppose. Which senator or representative wants to be on record voting against a measure designed to stop Nigerians from drowning?
The Minister’s Own Diagnosis
It is worth noting that Minister Oyetola has himself identified the direction. He has publicly called on state governments to phase out unsafe wooden boats and invest in modern vessels. His ministry has overseen a measurable improvement in NIWA’s operational capacity. He launched the CVFF portal with language about repositioning Nigeria’s maritime sector as a central pillar of national development.All of this is directionally correct. But calling on state governments to invest in vessel modernisation while the Federal Government holds $700 million in a fund that could finance exactly that investment is a policy gap that needs to be closed, not by more calls, but by action.The Minister does not need to wait for the National Assembly to act first. A ministerial directive expanding CVFF eligibility guidelines to include a dedicated inland waterway passenger transport window, pending full legislative amendment, would send an immediate signal to the sector. NIMASA, which already has a dedicated Cabotage Secretariat Unit managing CVFF implementation, has the institutional infrastructure to pilot such a window.
Connecting the Dots
Nigeria has the fund. Nigeria has the need. Nigeria has operators who want to do better. Nigeria has a regulatory framework that, with some expansion, can deliver accountability. Nigeria has a Minister who has diagnosed the problem correctly. Nigeria has a NIWA that has already demonstrated, in its own 62-seater pilot ferry, what a modern vessel looks like on an inland waterway.The only thing missing is the political will to connect these dots, to say, explicitly, that the CVFF is not only for shipowners dreaming of ocean-going cargo fleets, but also for the boat operator in Delta State who is running a cracked wooden hull because he has never had access to any other option.
Boat mishaps are not acts of God. They are the predictable outcome of a transport market in which safe vessels are financially inaccessible, and in which a fund designed to solve exactly that problem has been directed away from the people who need it most.The CVFF can rescue Nigeria’s inland waterways. But first, Nigeria must rescue the CVFF from a definition of its mission that is too narrow, too corporate, and too ocean-facing to save the lives being lost, right now, on the rivers that run through the heart of the country.The time to look downriver is long overdue.
Okeoghene Onoriobe writes for Waterways News (www.waterwaysnews.ng), Nigeria’s foremost digital publication covering ports, shipping, inland waterways, and the blue economy.© Waterways News | www.waterwaysnews.ng | All rights reserved
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.
Drowning in Wealth: How Nigeria Turned a Water Fortune Into a National Liability
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
Nigeria is a country naturally endowed with water. The lakes, rivers, lagoons, the tributaries within the delta, the entire coast line and many other water bodies. Nigeria is not a country lacking water. Nigeria is a country hemorrhaging water wealth, deliberately, repeatedly, and almost without shame.
The Niger. The Benue. The Cross River. The Niger Delta. The Atlantic coastline. This is not a modest endowment. This is the kind of natural inheritance that other nations would kill for and build empires on. Most countries handed rivers, deltas, and coastlines like these would construct entire economies around them. Food systems, transport corridors, tourism belts, fishing fleets, energy grids and many more. Nigeria built none of it. Nigeria imports fish in a country stitched together by rivers. Fish is one thing the rivers were built to give Nigeria for free.
And then the rains come, as they always do, and the same tired script plays out on cue. Communities vanish underwater. Homes, farmland, market stalls, entire neighborhoods, gone in a season. Families displaced, livelihoods erased, and somewhere in Abuja, a press statement goes out calling it a “natural disaster.” As if decades of unmanaged waterways, abandoned drainage infrastructure, and regulatory paralysis had absolutely nothing to do with it. As if the flooding were an act of God rather than the predictable outcome of a government that has spent generations looking away.
The part that actually hurt is that none of those had to happen. The potential was never in doubt. It has been sitting here all along, waiting, inside rivers this country has never bothered to properly manage.
The Benue-Niger confluence at Lokoja, Kogi state.
Food production: Waters capable of feeding this country several times over, left fallow while the food import bill climbs.
Water transport: Inland waterways that should be moving people and cargo at a fraction of road cost, still underused despite NIWA’s mandate and the billions loaded into the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund.
Tourism: A coastline and riverine landscape other countries would package and sell as a premium destination, left to rot in obscurity.
Fishing: An entire industry hollowed out by pollution, oil spills, and institutional neglect.
Trade: River and coastal corridors that could anchor Nigeria’s leverage inside the AfCFTA arrangement, sitting idle instead.
Energy: Hydro and blue economy potential that the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy has, so far, only managed to describe in speeches.
Let’s look at countries that have done their waters right. The Netherlands built an entire nation’s worth of infrastructure below sea level and turned water management into a global export industry. Vietnam clawed its economy back from the wreckage of war. Bangladesh, a country poorer than Nigeria, more flood-prone than Nigeria, turned water into the backbone of its economic survival strategy. Every one of these countries had less to work with than Nigeria does. Every one of them did more with it.
Meanwhile, Nigeria keeps bleeding wealth, year after year, in exactly the same places: floods that arrive on schedule and are met with the same shock each time. Pollution that goes unpoliced until a river is functionally dead, jetties and terminals commissioned with fanfare and then abandoned to rust and regulatory systems frozen in place while the world moves on.
The rivers were never the problem. They never asked to be mismanaged. The failure which has been total, sustained, and entirely avoidable, has been ours.
Nigeria Watch:
If you strip away the outrage, what remains is a management problem, not a natural one, and management problems have solutions. The NIWA-LASWA jurisdictional standoff needs to end, not to be repeated again and again in court filings while investment stalls on the water. The CVFF needs to reach the small operators actually moving people and goods on these rivers, not just the well-connected few who keep making headlines for the wrong reasons. Inland waterways safety needs to be treated as core infrastructure policy, funded and enforced before the next capsizing, not mourned after it. And the blue economy agenda coming out of the Ministry needs to start producing jetties, ferry routes, and functioning fish markets, not just another communiqué. Nigeria does not have a water problem. It has a governance problem wearing water as a disguise. Until that changes, the rivers will keep doing exactly what they have always done, and Nigeria will keep watching its own wealth wash out to sea, one flood season at a time.
AFRICA MOVES TO PLUG MARITIME SKILLS GAP WITH PROPOSED REGIONAL MARITIME UNIVERSITY
A feasibility study has laid out plans for a Regional Maritime University (RMU) to serve Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa, aimed at closing a widening shortage of certified maritime professionals across the region through stronger training, deeper research capacity and better access to compulsory sea-time.
The study, carried out by Professor Anish Hebbar, an Associate Professor at the World Maritime University (WMU), reviewed maritime education and training systems in member states of the Maritime Organization for Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa (MOESNA). It examined existing institutions, training capacity, infrastructure, regulatory compliance and industry demand to test whether a regional university is viable.
Presented to industry stakeholders for validation, the study envisions an institution capable of producing seafarers, marine engineers, port specialists and maritime policy professionals who can compete internationally, while boosting the region’s share of the global maritime labour market.
Despite the MOESNA region hosting roughly 731 universities and higher institutions overall, only 21 are recognised Maritime Education and Training (MET) centres. Kenya leads with 11, Tanzania has four, Ethiopia and Uganda have two apiece, while the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi have just one each. Botswana, Burundi and Zambia have none.
Even where MET institutions exist, the study found they are struggling to turn enrolment into certified, employable graduates. Limited access to mandatory sea-time, weak practical facilities and thin ties to shipping companies were identified as the main reasons students fail to complete certification. Of 26 maritime agencies and institutions surveyed, 84.6 percent said training infrastructure, particularly simulators, workshops and sea-time placements, needs significant upgrading to meet the practical training standards under the IMO’s STCW Convention.
The report argues that a shared regional university would let member states pool resources for costly assets such as simulators, training vessels and engineering labs that individual countries cannot afford alone, and recommends the RMU build long-term partnerships with shipping lines, port authorities and maritime administrations to lock in cadet placements and improve graduate employability.
The push comes against a global backdrop of officer shortages. BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping project a worldwide shortfall of 39,100 certified officers by 2026, even with a surplus of ratings. Researchers say Africa, where over 60 percent of the population is under 25, is well placed to help fill that gap, yet the continent supplies only about 4 percent of the world’s seafarers. Within MOESNA specifically, the region contributed just 4,947 seafarers in 2021, or 0.26 percent of global supply, with Tanzania accounting for nearly 90 percent of that figure while Kenya, despite having the most MET institutions, supplied only 185.
Higher-level maritime education is another weak point. Out of the 21 MET institutions, only five offer bachelor’s degrees, one offers a master’s, and none offers a doctoral programme, limiting research and the pipeline of future maritime educators. The proposed university would offer degree and postgraduate programmes alongside certification and specialised training in marine engineering, maritime law, port management, logistics, environmental protection, safety, digital technologies and the blue economy, with stakeholders pushing for added focus on AI, automation, green shipping, maritime cybersecurity and alternative fuels.
International recognition remains limited too. Only Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia sit on the IMO White List, and only Ethiopia is recognised by the European Maritime Safety Agency. The study argues a single regional university could harmonise standards and improve the mobility of African seafarers internationally.
Gender representation was flagged as another gap, with women making up about 23 percent of enrolment at selected African maritime institutions and roughly 1 percent of the global seafaring workforce. The study recommends scholarships, mentorship, affordable tuition and stronger welfare support to widen access for women and disadvantaged students.
Overall, the study concludes an RMU would strengthen training, research and regional harmonisation, but cautions its success will hinge on sustained political will, predictable funding, sound governance and durable industry partnerships to guarantee graduates the practical exposure they need for certification and jobs.
Nigeria Watch
Nigeria is not a MOESNA member, but the story lands close to home. The skills and sea-time crisis the study describes in Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa is, almost point for point, the same crisis Nigerian maritime training has wrestled with for years at the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN), Oron. Crises such as inadequate simulators, thin industry linkages, and cadets who complete coursework but stall at the certification stage for want of guaranteed sea-time berths.
The MOESNA study’s core diagnosis, that no single country can afford the full suite of simulators, training vessels and labs needed to meet STCW practical standards, so nations must pool resources, is a direct echo of arguments Nigerian stakeholders have made about NIMASA’s Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) and the long-running push to secure guaranteed cadet berths with international shipping lines. It also reinforces a point Nigerian commentary has made repeatedly that certification without sea-time is a dead end, and no amount of classroom capacity fixes that on its own.
There is a regional-diplomacy angle too. As West Africa’s Maritime Organization for West and Central Africa (MOWCA) region watches ECOWAS states debate similar training and cabotage-financing gaps, the MOESNA initiative is a useful comparison for how a regional bloc can formalise shared training infrastructure rather than each country building parochial, underfunded institutions. Nigeria’s own Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund (CVFF) debate, where small operators struggle to raise capital for modern vessels, mirrors the MOESNA study’s finding that individual states cannot shoulder capital-intensive maritime infrastructure alone.
The gender and youth findings also resonate. With women accounting for a small share of enrolment and an even smaller share of the seafaring workforce globally, and with Nigeria’s own maritime training bodies facing similar underrepresentation, the MOESNA recommendations on scholarships and welfare support add to a growing continental case for deliberate inclusion policy in maritime education, one Nigerian regulators and training institutions would do well to track as they shape their own reform agendas.
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