By Eric Aligula 

There is a manufacturing revolution unfolding inside Africa’s maritime jurisdictions, over which 38 of its 54 states exercise sovereign rights under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but much of which sits beyond African control.  Foreign fleets enter the continent’s 13 million square kilometres of the exclusive economic zones, deploy industrial catching, processing, refrigeration, and packaging systems, transform African fish into finished export products, and depart with the value.  All of this happens within waters where African states hold sovereign rights over those resources.  With few scattered exceptions, not a single node of those industrial operations touches African soil.  Not a single unit of manufactured value is retained.  The factories run at full capacity, inside zones under coastal state jurisdiction, and Africa has not yet fully understood that it is there.  Africa’s maritime domain already generates an estimated US$296 billion (UNCTAD, 2019) and supports nearly 49 million jobs, with African Union and UNDP projections rising to US$405 billion by 2030.  This sector clearly holds vast untapped potential.

This is not fundamentally a fisheries problem.  It is a structural failure of economic perception and policy design.  Africa suffers from a structural condition best described as sea blindness.  A continental failure to see its blue resources not merely as resource extraction zones from which raw materials are periodically removed but as productive spaces in which manufacturing, logistics, energy, technology, and human capital development can be organised, owned, and industrially scaled.  Africa is not failing to exploit its fishing grounds.  It is failing to claim manufacturing spaces over which it already holds sovereign rights.  Until this is corrected, the continent will continue exporting its raw materials and importing the finished products back at a premium.  This is the same structural trap that has defined African economies since independence, now playing out, unnoticed beneath the waterline.  This blindness is reinforced by fragmentation. Much of the sector remains informal and undercapitalised, undermining the continent’s ability to secure its maritime domains and limiting integration into national development systems. Its invisibility in national accounting systems and strategies reflects a deeper structural condition.

The fisheries value chain makes the case with arithmetic precision.  For instance, a World Bank Group analytical study (2023) reported that European companies paid Senegal US$90 per tonne of tuna caught in 2019, while earning US$1,687 per tonne at first sale.  The US$1,597 difference represents the gross value realised at first sale, before accounting for costs and downstream processing, illustrating the scale of value captured beyond access fees.  Additional value is subsequently generated through processing, cold chain logistics, packaging, and branding, stages largely external to African economies.  The pattern is consistent across other tuna fisheries, where African states retain only a fraction of the value generated within waters they govern.  This, together with the larger processing and branding value, comprises the entire manufacturing value chain that development economists have spent a generation urging African countries to build.  At the same time, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing continues to erode value. Estimates from the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies and FAO place annual losses to sub-Saharan Africa in the range of US$2 billion to US$10 billion, undermining resource sovereignty and placing critical ecological limits under strain.  Whatever its precise continental scale, this gap represents a recurring economic loss, which is part of the annual price of sea blindness.  

Maritime trade repeats the same logic at a scale that affects every African economy, including the 16 landlocked states that increasingly view the oceans as their developmental concern.  UNCTAD estimates that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is expected to significantly expand maritime activity, with demand for maritime freight projected to rise by 62% and intra-African freight by 28%.  By 2030, UNECA estimates that AfCFTA maritime cargo could more than double from 58 to 131 million tonnes, requiring significant upgrades to port infrastructure and increased investment in shipping capacity.  Yet Africa currently accounts for only about 3% of global trade by value.  Approximately 90% of global trade by volume moves by sea, leaving the continent structurally dependent on, and exposed to, a shipping and logistics system it does not control.  The shipping lines that serve Africa impose a range of destination charges, including terminal handling fees, port congestion surcharges, container cleaning and repair levies, and documentation fees, many set unilaterally, with no competitive counterbalance from African-owned carriers.  A Zambian copper exporter, an Ethiopian garment manufacturer, a Ugandan coffee farmer, and a Kenyan tea exporter each pay those premiums on every shipment, regardless of geography.  These charges, including freight charges, are largely repatriated out of Africa, despite the continent’s limited foreign exchange reserves.  In effect, the absence of African-controlled shipping capacity and logistics capabilities is not a maritime inconvenience.  It is a manufacturing competitiveness tax levied on every African economy.  

Sea blindness, in maritime trade, is not just a coastal problem.  It is a continental issue.  Offshore energy compounds the trap: Africa extracts hydrocarbons and offshore renewable resources that power foreign refineries, only to re-import fuel at global market prices for the very industrial zones Africa is attempting to build.  This circularity, exporting raw materials and importing finished products, mirrors the fisheries dynamic and reinforces broader industrial dependency.  These outcomes reflect governance gaps. Weak enforcement allows value to be externalised from African economies and creates space for illicit activities that distort markets, undermine state authority, and deter long-term investment.

Yet the most consequential expression of this sea blindness lies in what Africa has not yet fully appreciated.  The global food system is approaching a structural inflection point.  According to the Food and Agriculture Organization State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) 2024, a 74% increase in Africa’s aquatic animal food supply would be required by 2050 simply to maintain current per capita consumption.  To reach the current global average, supply would have to grow by 285%.  That demand will be met by blue foods, which FAO identifies as the most nutritionally efficient and environmentally responsible protein source available to the African people and the world.  Meeting these demand projections will require expanded investment in governance frameworks, processing capacity, and cold chain infrastructure that do not yet exist at scale across most of the continent.  Without that, Africa will remain dependent on expensive and vulnerable external supply chains to meet its food and nutrition security needs.

Seaweed anchors that ambition with an immediate commercial logic.  According to the Market Data Forecast for 2026 – 2034, Africa accounted for only 1.3% of global output in 2022, at about 200,000 tonnes.  This production is driven largely by small-scale coastal operations.  The key constraints include inadequate infrastructure, poor post-harvest processing capabilities, seasonal variability and climate vulnerability.  Blue technology closes the circle. Africa imports the substantial majority of the maritime technology it deploys, from vessel monitoring systems to aquaculture sensors, sourced from the same industrial economies that operate floating factories within its EEZ.  Reversing this will require deliberate technology transfer and local innovation capacity, not continued dependence.

At the same time, global maritime labour dynamics are shifting in ways that favour Africa.  According to the BIMCO & International Chamber of Shipping Seafarer Workforce Report of 2021, Africa contributes only approximately 78,000 seafarers, comprising 27,624 officers and 49,928 ratings, making about 4% of the global total of 1.892 million.  With a median population age of 19.7 years against 42.5 years in Europe, and with the global industry projected by BIMCO/ICS to face a shortfall of 89,510 certified officers by 2026, Africa is structurally placed to close this gap.  Expanding maritime training, certification, and deployment will not only help in meeting global demand but it will also address Africa’s significant youth employment challenge and enhance foreign currency remittances.  According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, remittances from sea-based Filipino workers reached US$6.94 billion in 2025, representing approximately 1.5% of GDP, within total overseas remittances of US$35.63 billion (7.3% of GDP).  More importantly, it will instil global operational discipline in our young people, enhance their technical skills and build the entrepreneurial capital that can be reinvested domestically.

This pipeline from blue economy employment through remittance-backed capitalisation to domestic entrepreneurship and local industrialisation is a human capital multiplier no land-based sector can replicate.  Applying the same per-seafarer remittance as in the Philippines suggests substantial fiscal upside: filling the 89,510-officer global shortfall projected by BIMCO/ICS for 2026 would generate annual remittance flows of approximately US$2.2 billion to US$2.7 billion, while scaling the African seafarer pool to match Philippine penetration of the global market by 2035 would lift indicative flows to US$5 billion or more, against a current African contribution estimated at approximately US$1.35 billion.  Africa has the demographics, the coastline, and the strategic position to meet global maritime labour demand and surpass it.  

The cumulative picture is clear.  Africa’s blue economy is not a latent opportunity awaiting discovery.  It is an active production system already generating significant value for others.  The continental policy architecture is already in place.  The 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy, the Lomé Charter of 2016, and the African Union Blue Economy Strategy of 2019 collectively articulate the ambition.  What remains absent is operational execution: binding targets and clear, capitalised delivery mechanisms, and enforceable accountability.  The continental gap is an implementation deficit.

If Africa is to construct a functional blue economy that materially improves the livelihoods of its people, it must reclaim the manufacturing floor that already operates within its maritime jurisdictions.  Three strategic decisions are needed to begin the shift from sea blindness.

First, the African states must operationalise clear value retention principles already articulated in the AU Blue Economy Strategy by establishing binding national frameworks.  They should embed clear blue value chain targets, including minimum domestic processing thresholds, local landing requirements, incentives for African-owned shipping and logistics capacity, blue food production goals, maritime education and training targets, as well as seafarer welfare and support frameworks.  This must be supported by accurate data, informed by industrialisation policy, and aligned with continental and national delivery mechanisms.  

Second, Africa must activate the 2050 AIMS framework for coordinated engagements with external partners with a clear objective of optimising value capture from its own marine and maritime estate.  Fragmented, bilateral approaches have consistently yielded sub-optimal outcomes.  Collective negotiation, anchored in shared principles of value capture and sustainability, is the operational test of the strategy.  

Third, a dedicated financing mechanism is required to scale blue economy industrialisation beyond the current envelope of the AfDB blue economy programs and partner facilities such as PROBLUE.  The African Development Bank and the African Export-Import Bank are well placed to anchor such a blended facility that will mobilise long-term, patient, and affordable capital for productive infrastructure, including the construction of green ports, processing facilities, and cold chain networks; the expansion of maritime domain awareness systems and maritime education institutions; and the commercialisation of seaweed and blue food value chains.  This will convert Africa’s blue economy potential into actual production.  

These actions, seeking to ensure sustainable and secure green-blue industrial expansion, must be underpinned by strengthened blue economy governance systems, including enhanced maritime domain awareness and enforcement capacity to ensure that economic gains are not undermined by illicit activities or resource depletion.  

The Africa Forward Summit convenes at precisely the moment when this diagnosis demands urgent action.  It does so when the shift is both necessary and feasible.  The question is no longer whether Africa possesses the resources, geography or demographic profile to build a competitive economy.  It does.  The question is whether it will continue to outsource the industrial value generated within its own sovereign waters to the detriment of its own people.  

Africa does not need to discover its blue economy.  It needs to govern it.  And in doing so, claim the manufacturing floor that has long operated within plain sight.

The author is a Co-Convenor of the Roundtable on Unlocking the Blue Economy Potential at the Africa Forward Summit 2026 and serves as Head of the Ocean and Blue Economy Office in the Executive Office of the President, where he provides strategic policy and analytical support on blue economy governance, maritime development, and sustainable blue resource management, including to the Kenyan Sherpa and the country’s engagement with the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy.  The views expressed are those of the author in his personal capacity. 

About the Africa Forward Summit (AFS) 2026
The Africa Forward Summit is a joint Africa–France initiative, co-convened by the Republic of Kenya and the Republic of France, with African Union endorsement. It takes place in Nairobi on 11–12 May 2026 and represents a structural shift in how Africa and France engage – from a donor-recipient dynamic to a partnership grounded in innovation, parity and shared implementation. It prioritises African agency and serves as a catalyst for sustainable development and inclusive prosperity.

Dr Eric Aligula, EBS, AMP(K), MBS is Head, The Oceans and Blue Economy Office, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT