Kilaparti Ramakrishna is a senior advisor to the President and director on Ocean and Climate Policy Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
As delegates gathered in Mombasa, Kenya, this month for the first Our Ocean Conference held on African soil, the setting carried its own argument. For centuries the Indian Ocean linked Africa to Asia and the Middle East, moving goods, people and ideas that shaped the continent. Today the ocean is back at the center of a different question: how to build prosperity without dismantling the systems that prosperity depends on.
That question matters most in Africa, and it’s worth being precise about what people mean when they invoke the “Blue Economy,” because the term gets used loosely. Often it’s shorthand for any economic activity that happens at sea — fishing, shipping, offshore energy, tourism, mineral extraction — as if putting those activities in the ocean makes them blue by definition.
It doesn’t. Growth that empties fish stocks, clears mangroves and fouls coastal waters may show up in a ledger, but it isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t equitable. A real Blue Economy pursues growth and jobs while keeping ocean ecosystems healthy enough to keep producing them.
That distinction matters more for Africa than almost anywhere else. The continent has more than 30,000 kilometers of coastline and 38 coastal states, six of them island nations. Its seas feed people, employ people and move goods that keep economies running. Managed well, African fisheries and aquaculture could do more for nutrition and jobs than they currently do. Offshore wind and marine biotechnology could diversify economies still dependent on a handful of exports. Mangroves and reefs, left standing, buffer storms and store carbon at a fraction of the cost of engineered alternatives — a seawall poured in concrete doesn’t regenerate itself, and a mangrove forest does.
None of that happens automatically. For generations the ocean has been treated mainly as a place to take things from and put things into, and the results are visible: depleted stocks, damaged habitats, coastal communities more exposed to storms and rising seas than they were a generation ago. The task isn’t to grow the ocean economy. It’s to grow it on different terms.
Three things have to be in place.
The first is governance — marine spatial planning, coastal management and institutions that give local communities a real stake in outcomes, not just a seat at meetings. In Kenya, the Mikoko Pamoja project shows what this looks like in practice: a community-run mangrove conservation scheme near Gazi Bay that pays for itself through the sale of carbon credits while restoring the forest that protects the coastline it grows on. Revenue from the credits funds local schools and clean water projects, which gives residents a direct financial reason to keep the mangroves standing rather than clearing them for fuel or farmland. It works because the people managing the resource are the same people who depend on it — a simple alignment that a lot of conservation programs designed from outside the community never quite manage.
The second is finance. It remains strange that destroying a coastline is easy to finance and protecting one is hard — that money moves quickly toward rebuilding after a cyclone but slowly, if at all, toward the mangroves and reefs that would have blunted it. Public money can’t close that gap alone, but it can do what private capital won’t: fund the underlying science, build the institutions that make investment less risky, and absorb enough early loss that private investors are willing to follow. Blended finance structures — where a development bank or government takes the first-loss position on a coastal-resilience project — already exist for exactly this purpose; they’re just underused in African markets, where the perceived risk is often higher than the actual risk. The goal isn’t simply new markets. It’s markets that price nature’s value instead of ignoring it.
The third is science, not as an afterthought but as the basis for everything else. You can’t manage fish stocks you haven’t counted, protect a reef system you haven’t mapped, or attract investors without data credible enough for them to trust. Much of Africa’s coastline still lacks the basic oceanographic monitoring that policymakers in wealthier regions take for granted. For African governments already stretched thin, ocean science can look like a luxury. It’s closer to a precondition — the difference between a fisheries policy built on estimates and one built on evidence.
There are signs the world is catching up to this way of thinking. The U.N. Decade of Ocean Science, the Paris climate process and the new high-seas biodiversity treaty all treat the ocean less as a set of separate industries and more as one system that touches climate, food and economic security together.
Africa doesn’t have to wait for that thinking to arrive from elsewhere. It has some of the fastest-growing coastal economies in the world, a young population, and marine ecosystems that much of the rest of the world has already degraded. That combination is an argument for doing this differently from the start, rather than industrializing first and repairing the damage later — the pattern most wealthy economies followed, and are still paying for.
The question isn’t whether Africa can take part in a Blue Economy defined somewhere else. It’s whether Africa defines it first. Mombasa was as good a place as any to start making that case.
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