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Global Maritime Welfare Charity Expands Wellbeing Tracking Beyond the Ship’s Rail with New Shore-Based Index
Global Maritime Welfare Charity Expands Wellbeing Tracking Beyond the Ship’s Rail with New Shore-Based Index
The Mission to Seafarers launches the ShoreHI — a first-of-its-kind tool to measure happiness among maritime professionals on land
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News Correspondent
For nearly a decade, the maritime world has had a window into the emotional and psychological state of seafarers at sea. Now, a global welfare charity is turning that lens landward — and the people who manage Nigeria’s ports, crewing agencies, maritime law firms, logistics companies and shipping operations may soon find their own wellbeing under scrutiny.
The Mission to Seafarers has announced the launch of its Shorebased Happiness Index (ShoreHI) — a new welfare measurement tool designed to capture the wellbeing and job satisfaction of maritime professionals working on land, for the very first time.
The ShoreHI mirrors the structure and methodology of the internationally recognised Seafarers Happiness Index (SHI) and will consist of a 10-question, 1-to-10-scale survey targeting those employed ashore in maritime roles — including ship management, port operations, maritime law, insurance, logistics, finance, and technology.
The move has particular relevance for Nigeria’s maritime sector, where tens of thousands of shore-based professionals — from NPA staff and freight forwarders at Apapa and Tin Can Island to NIMASA regulators and shipping agents — work under significant pressure with little formal measurement of their workplace welfare.
The key objectives of the ShoreHI are to generate industry-wide insights that enable data-driven improvements in workplace culture, retention, and performance, and to provide robust comparative data to support better welfare policies.
Steven Jones, who founded both indices, explained the rationale behind the expansion. “We have spent years measuring happiness at sea,” he said. “Now it is time to measure the wellbeing of the people ashore whose decisions shape life onboard. If we want happier, safer, and more supported seafarers, we need to understand the pressures and realities on both sides of the ship-shore divide.”
Ben Bailey, Director of Programme at the Mission to Seafarers, said the new tool completes a picture that the SHI alone could not provide. “The Seafarers Happiness Index has given us a clear view of life at sea. What it also shows is that many of those pressures originate ashore. ShoreHI is the next step — connecting both sides of the sector so we can move from anecdote to evidence, and target the changes that will have the greatest impact on wellbeing across the maritime workforce.”
The survey will be conducted anonymously and built on the existing Seafarers Happiness Index infrastructure, keeping additional resource requirements to a minimum. Over time, ShoreHI results will be aggregated alongside seafarer findings to build the most complete picture yet of how work and organisational culture interact across global maritime operations.
The announcement comes at a time when Nigeria’s maritime workforce is under considerable strain. Port congestion, policy uncertainty, low welfare standards for terminal workers, and the mental health burden on shipping professionals have all been subjects of growing concern — issues that Waterways News has reported on extensively.
The SHI, which is now in its 10th year, is run quarterly by the Mission to Seafarers in collaboration with Idwal and NorthStandard, and supported by Inmarsat. Its most recent edition recorded a modest rise in seafarer happiness to 6.98 out of 10, up from 6.91 in Q4 2024 — though concerns remain around aging vessels, maintenance pressures, and shore leave restrictions.
With the ShoreHI now joining the suite, maritime professionals on both sides of the gangway — including those working across Nigeria’s major ports and waterways — will for the first time have a formal channel through which their wellbeing can be tracked, compared, and acted upon.
NIGERIA WATCH
How this story connects to Nigeria’s maritime sector
The launch of the Shorebased Happiness Index arrives at a defining moment for Nigeria’s maritime industry — one in which the human cost of keeping Africa’s busiest port economy running is rarely counted, let alone measured.
Nigeria’s shore-based maritime workforce is vast and varied. It spans the dock workers and terminal operators at the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA)-administered facilities in Apapa, Tin Can Island, Onne, Warri, Calabar and Port Harcourt; the freight forwarders and clearing agents regulated by the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS); the seafarer certification and vessel inspection teams at the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA); the waterway transport operators and inland port personnel under the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA); and thousands more employed across crewing agencies, maritime law firms, logistics companies, and ship chandlers spread across the Niger Delta and Lagos corridor.
Despite the scale and strategic importance of this workforce — one that underpins Nigeria’s import-export lifeline and a significant share of its non-oil foreign exchange earnings — there is currently no formal, structured mechanism for tracking the welfare and job satisfaction of these professionals. Their grievances, burnout levels, workplace pressures, and morale are largely invisible to policymakers.
This is where the ShoreHI could change the conversation. Should Nigerian shore-based maritime workers participate in the index in meaningful numbers, the resulting data could provide the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy — led by Minister Adegboyega Oyetola — with an independent, evidence-based picture of workforce wellbeing across the sector. It would complement the Ministry’s ongoing reform agenda and give added weight to calls for improved welfare conditions, better pay structures, and more humane working environments at Nigeria’s ports.
For NIMASA, whose mandate includes the welfare and certification of Nigerian seafarers and maritime labour compliance, the ShoreHI represents an opportunity to benchmark Nigeria’s shore-based workforce against global standards — and to identify systemic gaps that internal reporting alone may not capture. The agency has in recent years expanded its focus on seafarer welfare, but the wellbeing of the shore-based professionals who support seafarers has remained a blind spot.
The Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), which advocates for the interests of cargo owners and monitors port service quality, would also find value in ShoreHI data. A demotivated or poorly supported port workforce — from berth allocation officers to terminal gate staff — directly affects cargo dwell time, port efficiency, and ultimately the cost of doing business at Nigerian ports.
For organised maritime labour, including the Maritime Workers’ Union of Nigeria (MWUN) and the National Union of Seafarers of Nigeria (NUSN), the ShoreHI offers a rare external validation tool — one that could strengthen their advocacy with port employers and government regulators by replacing anecdote with hard data.
Nigeria’s participation in the ShoreHI is not automatic. It requires deliberate engagement — from NIMASA and the Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy encouraging participation, to industry associations like the Nigerian Shipowners Association (NISA), the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), and the Shipping Companies of Nigeria (SHIPPERS-COMP) circulating the survey among their members. The more Nigerian voices that feed into the index, the more relevant and actionable its findings will be for our sector.
At a time when Nigeria is positioning itself as the maritime hub of West and Central Africa, understanding whether the people who run that hub are fulfilled, supported, and fairly treated is not a soft question. It is a strategic one.
Waterways News will continue to monitor Nigeria’s engagement with the Shorebased Happiness Index and report on any findings with implications for domestic maritime policy and workforce welfare.