Ocean Capital: The Shoreline Plumbing of Blue Finance

Zach Martin

Here's a number to start the hour with: one. One cable landing station in Freetown carries Sierra Leone's connection to the global internet. It was funded in 2010 through the World Bank's West African Regional Communications Infrastructure Program, and it hooked the country into the Africa Coast to Europe cable system, the one everybody calls ACE. More than a decade later, that single thread is still the country's lifeline. And according to the government's own terms of reference from January 2025, the consortium behind that cable is coming to the end of its design life within two to three years.

Zach Martin

Welcome to Ocean Capital on KMKT IR Hub Radio. I'm Zach Martin, and this is the show where we treat the ocean like a balance sheet: ports, cables, shipping lanes, blue finance, and the shoreline infrastructure that decides whether money actually lands on a coast or sails right past it. If you listened to our last hour, Blue Balance Sheets, we spent it on the big diagnosis. The roughly $550 billion a year funding gap for a sustainable ocean economy. And we talked about what happened in March 2024, when three subsea cables off the west coast of Africa broke at once, and a lot of the region found out how much of its economy runs through a few strands of glass on the seabed.

Zach Martin

This hour is the sequel, and it's about execution. Diagnosis is easy to applaud. Plumbing is where the game is won. So we're going to follow four recent milestones, and we'll keep coming back to one country to make them concrete. Sierra Leone. First, the updated Ocean Investment Protocol from UNEP FI, the finance industry's rulebook for ocean money, refreshed in September 2026. Second, the third berth at Freetown's Queen Elizabeth II Quay, now built. Third, the feasibility work for a second submarine cable, which would branch off Meta's 2Africa system. And fourth, the legal transition at the Sierra Leone Ports and Harbours Authority, under a 2023 act of parliament that changed who runs what on that waterfront.

Zach Martin

Now, I'm a football guy, so let me give you the frame I'll use all hour. Everybody watches the quarterback. The highlight reel is the touchdown pass. But anybody who's followed the game for long knows the pass doesn't happen unless the offensive line holds, and nobody puts the offensive line on a poster. Ocean finance has a highlight reel too. Blue bonds, big conference announcements, billion dollar pledges. This hour is about the offensive line. The quays, the cables, the quotas, the cold rooms. Because a phrase I'll use again and again today is wet acreage. Ocean potential that exists on paper, and cannot carry a loan, an insurance policy, or an investor's trust, until somebody builds the plumbing that turns it into an asset with a contract attached.

Zach Martin

Let's start with the size of the thing. The Ocean Panel, which is the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, a coalition of 18 countries, put out a working paper in 2025 on ocean finance. It leans on OECD work and says that in terms of gross value added, the ocean economy would have ranked fifth in 2019 and seventh in 2020. It supported up to 133 million full time equivalent jobs globally in 2019. And the paper cites estimates that the ocean supports the livelihoods of over three billion people. The figure in your show notes for 2020 is about $2.6 trillion in gross value added, and the OECD projection is that this roughly doubles by 2050.

Zach Martin

On trade, UNCTAD's figure is that global exports of ocean based goods and services topped $2.3 trillion in 2023, and ocean services made up more than half of that. Services. Think shipping, port handling, tourism, the digital traffic. Not just fish on ice. And on our own continent, the African Union estimates the blue economy generates about $300 billion a year across Africa and supports 49 million livelihoods. That's the number a Sierra Leonean researcher pair, Sorie Kalie Bangura and Emmanuel Bongay, quote in a paper we'll get to. I'd flag that these are estimates built from different definitions by different institutions, so treat them as orders of magnitude, not as an audited statement. But the order of magnitude is the point. This is not a niche.

Zach Martin

So why does the same Ocean Panel paper open its key findings with a shortfall? Because current financial flows fall short of an estimated $550 billion per year needed to support the sustainable ocean economy. That's the number from last time. The working range across six priority themes runs from $383 billion to $717 billion a year. The themes: ocean conservation, sustainable seafood, circular economy and blue technology, sustainable infrastructure, marine renewables, and what planners call ridge to reef, meaning the watershed all the way out to the coral. And if you want the older, narrower version of the same complaint, Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, has long been called the most underfunded of the Sustainable Development Goals. A legacy estimate puts its annual gap at $174.72 billion. Different scope, same story.

Zach Martin

Now, the natural question is whether the public money is closing that gap. Let's look at the donor side. Official development assistance aimed at sustainable ocean activities did grow. It reached $2.4 billion in 2022, up from $1.2 billion in 2010. Doubled. That's real. But the same paper points out that this is still less than 1 percent of all official development assistance. And the total pie is shrinking. Overall official development assistance fell 7.1 percent in 2024, which the OECD flagged as the first decline after five consecutive years of growth. For anyone planning on grant funded ocean projects through 2026, that's a headwind, and the Ocean Panel authors say sustainable ocean ODA is expected to decline along with it. Add philanthropy, which the brief puts at only about $2.8 billion a year for marine conservation, and you can see the problem. The generous money is small and it's getting a little smaller.

Zach Martin

And here's the part that I think deserves more airtime than the pledges. The money flowing the wrong way is enormous. The Ocean Panel paper cites harmful fishing subsidies of about $22 billion a year, a figure from Sumaila and colleagues, subsidies that encourage overfishing. It cites $1.1 trillion paid in fossil fuel subsidies in 2023. The OECD reported that 65 percent of all support to fisheries between 2020 and 2022 carried a risk of encouraging unsustainable fishing in the absence of effective management. And UNEP's estimate for nature negative finance across the whole economy is around $7 trillion a year. Even inside fisheries aid, the paper says support to sustainable fisheries was 59 percent of the $4.5 billion in official development assistance disbursed to fisheries between 2010 and 2022. Meaning, in the aid that's supposed to help, 41 percent wasn't going to the sustainable kind.

Zach Martin

Let me be careful about what I'm claiming there, because a stat like that invites a leap. I'm not saying a subsidy dollar and a conservation dollar are interchangeable, or that you could just move the one to the other tomorrow. The Ocean Panel authors recommend redirecting those flows, and they list removing harmful subsidies and considering ocean user fees as potential mechanisms. That's their recommendation. What the numbers establish is something simpler: it's not only that the ocean is underfunded, it's that a large amount of capital is already pointed at the wrong target. The gap is partly a shortage and partly a steering problem.

Zach Martin

Then there's who gets to borrow. The brief I'm working from says the Asia Pacific region represents roughly 56 percent of global blue financing requirements. That tells you where the biggest sums are. But the harder problem sits with African coastal nations, small island developing states, and least developed countries. They hold a large share of the world's marine biodiversity, and the Ocean Panel paper says plainly that climate vulnerable communities and countries with high debt burdens lack adequate access to grants and concessional capital, and also to commercial finance. Shallow domestic debt markets. Low or no sovereign credit ratings. Steep borrowing premiums. So the paper says the first thing those countries need is financing for the infrastructure and technology to produce and run a better regulatory framework. Read that sentence again. Before the investor shows up, you need the plumbing and the paperwork. That's the thesis of this episode, and it comes from an Ocean Panel working paper, not from me.

Zach Martin

So let's move up a floor to the rulebook, because the rulebook just changed. In April 2025, UNEP FI, the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, held a launch for something called the Ocean Investment Protocol. The pitch was a framework that gives financial institutions and ocean based industries guidance to align their activities with Sustainable Development Goal 14 and related objectives. Then, in September 2026, UNEP FI published an updated edition. Its own description says it reflects developments in the sustainable ocean finance landscape and highlights new priorities, including stronger action by central banks, regulators, and supervisors, and better integration of ocean considerations into financial decision making.

Zach Martin

Now why would an ocean protocol start talking to central banks? Here's my reading, and I'll mark it as my reading. When the early blue finance conversation was about voluntary frameworks and individual banks choosing to be good citizens, the ceiling was low. A bank can do a nice blue loan and the rest of its book can keep financing the harmful pathways. If regulators and supervisors start asking whether ocean related risk is material to a bank's or an insurer's balance sheet, it stops being a corporate social responsibility conversation and starts being a capital adequacy conversation. UNEP FI's own writing in June 2026 makes a related point, saying that conserving ocean biodiversity is increasingly material to financial institutions. And that same article invites banks and insurers to help design new financial vehicles under One Ocean Finance, a new initiative led by UN agencies and global partners to boost finance for ocean dependent industries and blue economy sectors.

Zach Martin

What does One Ocean Finance actually do? I'll tell you what the sources support and not a bit more. It's described as an initiative aiming to blend public and private capital, and the June 2026 article calls it an opportunity to shape a new public and private finance mechanism. It is at a design stage, with financial institutions being invited in to help build the vehicles. So if you hear somebody on a panel talk as if it's a fund with a balance and a track record, that's running ahead of the evidence. At this point it's a blueprint with a seat open for the financial sector.

Zach Martin

Let's look at the instruments that already exist, because they set the scale. Cumulative blue bond issuance had surpassed $10.4 billion by early 2025, according to the Climate Bonds Initiative figure in the brief. The Ocean Panel paper uses the same at least $10.4 billion number. In 2023, the International Finance Corporation and the International Capital Market Association published guidance on blue bonds, which UNEP FI flagged as helping to unlock finance for the sustainable ocean economy. And Phenix Capital, a data provider, has tracked over $76 billion raised by 186 blue economy funds since 2015.

Zach Martin

Let me put those in proportion, with an honest caveat. $10.4 billion is cumulative over several years. The $550 billion is an annual need. So that's not a clean comparison, apples and oranges to a degree. But even so, 10.4 over 550 is under 2 percent, and if you stretch the blue bond total over several years the annual flow looks smaller still. The $76 billion across 186 funds over about a decade is more encouraging in absolute terms, but it's spread across a broad definition of blue economy, and a fund raised is not the same as a project built. The mechanisms are real. They're also small relative to the job.

Zach Martin

Why are they small? The Ocean Panel paper gives a pretty blunt list of barriers, and I want to read them to you in plain terms. One, no universally agreed framework or taxonomy for sustainable ocean finance, so nobody can say with authority what counts. Two, inadequate disclosure, transparency, and traceability across ocean sectors and across public and private money. Three, limited capacity, high transaction costs, and low and slow return profiles, especially for community based and small scale projects, and for conservation projects in least developed countries and small island states. Four, policy misalignment, such as those harmful subsidies, and a lack of regulation and governance that fully integrates ocean sustainability. Put those together and you get the market's constant worry about blue washing, where a label gets stuck on something that isn't ocean positive, because there's no agreed definition to hold it to.

Zach Martin

The paper's recommendations read like a to do list for the plumbing. Create dedicated ocean accounts. Adopt a universal taxonomy for the sustainable ocean economy. Enforce disclosure standards that incorporate marine related financial risks. Help build project pipelines through knowledge sharing, capacity building for proposals, and seed finance. Standardize definitions and consolidate application processes so that small island states and least developed countries aren't drowning in paperwork. Notice what those have in common. None of them is a glamorous investment. They're data, definitions, and procedures. In other words, the things that let a risk committee say yes.

Zach Martin

There's one more number from that paper I find clarifying, on the insurance side. It cites forecasts that insurance premiums for climate resilience and natural catastrophe protection will rise 50 percent by 2030, and that additional insurance coverage is needed for over half of the $19 trillion already committed to financing the climate transition. That's from Howden and Boston Consulting Group. Why mention insurance in a conversation about ocean capital? Because a port, a cable landing station, and a fish processing plant on a coast all need coverage to be financed. If coastal risk gets priced higher and data on that risk is thin, projects in the places with the least data get the worst terms. Data is a financial asset.

Zach Martin

So we've gone from the global picture to the rulebook. Now let's land the plane in one country. Sierra Leone has a 506 kilometer coastline, and it sits on what that paper by Bangura and Bongay calls one of the world's richest fishing grounds. The paper came out in April 2025 in the GRS Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Studies. The authors ran an econometric time series analysis, 1990 to 2023, looking at whether ocean trade, fisheries, aquaculture, and agriculture as a control variable, relate to GDP. They used Granger causality tests and, per the brief, Johansen cointegration analysis, and they report three stable cointegrating equations linking GDP and those blue economy factors. Their conclusion, in the paper's words, is that blue economy factors significantly contribute to Sierra Leone's economic progress.

Zach Martin

I want to treat that with some care. It's a journal paper using secondary data, mostly from the World Bank's open data portal, and a statistical link between sectors and GDP over 33 years isn't a promise that new investment will pay off. The authors themselves build the argument on Hirschman's idea of unbalanced growth, which says a developing economy with thin infrastructure and few investors shouldn't try to grow everything at once. It should pick sectors by comparative advantage, potential yield, and share of national revenue, and let the linkages pull other sectors along. That's a useful way to read the rest of this hour. We're going to look at where Sierra Leone's investment priorities sit, and whether the infrastructure for them is actually getting built.

Zach Martin

The most striking fact in the paper isn't a regression. It's a scatter plot. Using UNCTAD data, the authors compare ocean trade across selected ECOWAS countries, and for 2018 almost all of them, Sierra Leone included, show ocean product exports under half a billion dollars. Nigeria stands apart at more than $1.5 billion. The authors ask the essential question themselves: why Sierra Leone's ocean commerce lags behind others in the sub region. They note that the country has passed sector policies and laws on fisheries, marine matters, biodiversity, and more, and that it still lags. That's the sound of a country with plenty of wet acreage and not enough of the things that convert it. So let's go look at those things, starting with the thread that ties a country to the world, a single strand of glass.

Zach Martin

Submarine telecommunication cables carry over 90 percent of global electronic traffic. That's a figure the UN has used and the Bangura and Bongay paper repeats. Ninety percent. So when we talk about ocean capital, I want you to hold in your head that one of the ocean's most valuable economic functions is a dark channel on the seabed, a couple of inches thick, through which banks settle trades and customs systems clear containers and a government pays its civil servants. It never appears in a fisheries statistic. It rarely appears in a blue economy pitch deck. And it's the hidden shoreline infrastructure of the digital age.

Zach Martin

Here's Sierra Leone's exposure, as the Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation put it in a terms of reference document dated January 2025. Internet penetration, according to the International Telecommunication Union, rose from 18 percent in 2020 to 21.2 percent in 2023. Growth. But the same document says, and I'm quoting the sense closely, that the country's reliance on a single submarine cable poses significant risks to its national connectivity. There is only one submarine cable landing station. It was funded by the World Bank's regional communications program in 2010, through the Africa Coast to Europe consortium. And, I'll repeat it because it's the crux, that consortium is approaching the end of its design life in the next two to three years, as of the document's writing.

Zach Martin

Let me explain the end of design life, because it's a phrase that sounds like an expiry date on milk, and it's not quite that. A subsea cable is built to a planned lifespan, with repeaters, those amplifiers spaced along the route, and power feed equipment engineered around it. Capacity gets upgraded over time through the terminal equipment on land, but the physical system has a horizon after which owners face a decision: invest to extend, replace, or fade. I'm giving you the general idea, not a specific engineering finding on ACE. What the Sierra Leone document establishes is the headline: a single point of failure, aging, with a clock on it.

Zach Martin

And then the clock got a rehearsal. In March 2024, three subsea cables off the west coast of Africa broke, including the ACE cable. The terms of reference says this led to widespread internet disruptions in Sierra Leone, and that outages and connectivity issues hit mobile operators and internet service providers. The reporting the brief draws on goes further, saying the severance halted trade clearance, banking, and government digital services. That's the real cost center. An outage on a streaming service is an annoyance. An outage on a customs window or a bank's settlement system is a stoppage in the real economy. That's what makes this a capital question. Nobody lends against the cash flows of a port or a bank, or a fish exporter filing paperwork, without assuming the connection will be there.

Zach Martin

So what's the response? Here's where the institutional machinery shows up. The Sierra Leone Digital Transformation Project is a five year project funded by a $50 million grant from the International Development Association, the World Bank's concessional arm. Project ID IDA dash E1130 dash SL, if you're keeping a file. The implementing agency is the Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation. Its objective is to expand access to broadband, enhance digital skills, and improve the government's capacity to deliver public services digitally. And within that project, in January 2025, the ministry set out terms of reference to recruit a consulting firm to conduct a feasibility study for a second submarine cable in Sierra Leone.

Zach Martin

Now, I like these documents, because they show you how infrastructure sausage gets made. This one asks for a firm that will, first, identify and evaluate options for landing a second cable. Second, assess the regulatory changes or new policies needed. Third, analyze current and projected demand for bandwidth, data usage, and services. Fourth, evaluate the technical requirements, including infrastructure, terrestrial backhaul, which is the land based network that carries traffic from the beach to the rest of the country, and network integration. Fifth, an environmental and social impact assessment specific to the landing site and the broader ecology. Sixth, a risk assessment covering regulatory hurdles, environmental concerns, and technical limitations. And seventh, a cost benefit analysis of deploying and maintaining a second cable, including potential revenue streams.

Zach Martin

The schedule is brisk. The consultant is expected to complete the whole assignment within three months from contract signature. The deliverables are laid out with payment tied to them: an inception report at two weeks, 10 percent of the fee. A technical feasibility report at four weeks, 20 percent. A market and demand analysis at six weeks, 10 percent. A regulatory and legal framework report at seven weeks, 15 percent. An economic and financial feasibility report at eight weeks, 15 percent. An environmental and social impact assessment report at ten weeks, 10 percent. And a final feasibility study report at twelve weeks, 20 percent. Notice the design. The biggest single payments go with the technical feasibility and the final report. They're paying for the engineering answer and the integrated answer. That's how a government buys confidence.

Zach Martin

The team requirements tell you what the ministry thinks a bankable cable looks like. A telecom specialist with eight to ten years of experience and a background in subsea fiber optic cable and landing station design, including practical knowledge of branching units, repeaters, power feed equipment, line terminal equipment, and the optical distribution frame. A financial modeler with eight to ten years in public and private partnership infrastructure, who can build projections for construction, operation, and maintenance of a cable and landing station over a 15 year period. A legal and partnership specialist to structure the deal. And an environmental and social impact specialist, with experience meeting World Bank and IFC standards, and with marine habitat protection and community welfare in the scope. Notice that this is a lawyers, financiers, and ecologists list as much as an engineers list. The cable is a financial instrument that happens to be laid in the water.

Zach Martin

Now the question I'd ask if I were an investor. Who pays, and who owns the access? Here's the architecture the document describes. The major mobile network operators in the country, it names Orange, Africell, QCell, Metro, Leonecom, and Zoodlabs, are exploring the formation of a consortium to land a second cable, as a branch off the 2Africa submarine cable, which is owned by Meta. So the idea is not to build a whole new transatlantic style system from scratch. It's to take a branch off a very large existing trunk system and bring it to Freetown. That changes the economics. Instead of financing the full length of a cable, you're financing a branching unit, a spur, a landing station, and the terrestrial links to the market.

Zach Martin

But a consortium of competing operators raises a classic problem. If the companies that own the cable are also the companies that sell internet service, what stops them from charging each other, and everyone else, monopoly prices for capacity? The terms of reference anticipates that. It asks the consultants to analyze a regulatory framework to ensure open access and affordability, and to identify the changes needed to facilitate public and private partnerships, referencing successful regional case studies. Open access means the landing station and capacity are available to any licensed operator on fair terms. That's the telecom version of the landlord port idea we'll get to in a moment, and I think that's no coincidence. It's the same institutional logic: separate who owns the asset from who gets to use it.

Zach Martin

There's also a transparency wrinkle worth noticing. The document I'm reading from is a copy with the World Bank's comments in the file name, so it's a working draft on the ministry's own website. And its confidentiality section says that any material created in fulfilling the contract falls under the exclusive ownership of the World Bank, and may not be disclosed publicly or to third parties without the Bank's written consent. Now, that's standard procurement language for a consultancy, and I'm not suggesting anything sinister. But think about what it means for the public conversation. The feasibility study is the document that would let an outsider evaluate the cost of a second cable, and it isn't designed to be a public document. If you're a local bank or a pension fund wondering whether to join a financing, you'll be depending on what the parties decide to release.

Zach Martin

What can I tell you about the outcome? Honestly, what the record supports is where things stood at the start: the terms of reference were issued in January 2025 and the consortium was exploring options. I don't have in front of me a signed cable contract, a final cost figure, or a ready for service date, and I won't invent them. If somebody hands you a launch date for the second cable, ask to see the feasibility report it came from. And ask about the first cable's clock, because the timing matters more than anything. If ACE reaches the end of its design life in the two to three years the ministry cited in January 2025, then the second cable isn't just about resilience in the abstract. It's about whether a replacement path exists before the first path fades.

Zach Martin

I think this is also the best illustration of the whole hour's argument. Imagine you're a fisheries exporter, or a bulk terminal operator, or a bank in Freetown. You can have a perfect quay and a perfect quota system, and if the one cable goes dark, your customs declarations, your letters of credit, your vessel tracking data all go with it. The Ocean Panel paper said these countries need financing for the infrastructure and technology that produce a better regulatory framework. Vessel monitoring, ocean accounts, electronic payment of port fees, they all ride on bandwidth. Redundancy isn't a luxury feature. It's what lets every other ocean asset be underwritten.

Zach Martin

And a quick contrast for the skeptics who say a second cable is a gold plated ask for a country where about one in five people use the internet. Fair point to raise. The terms of reference answers with the growth trend: 18 percent to 21.2 percent in three years, and projected demand analysis as an explicit task. The feasibility study exists precisely to test whether demand supports the capital cost, over a 15 year horizon. That's the right way to put the question. Not, is a cable a nice idea, but, does the cash flow and the public benefit justify the financing structure. That's a balance sheet question, and it's why this belongs on this show.

Zach Martin

Let's leave the seabed and come ashore, to the hard shoreline. Freetown sits on what's described as Africa's largest natural harbor. A natural harbor is wet acreage with a head start, deep water and shelter that nobody had to dredge into existence. But a natural harbor on its own doesn't make a port. A port needs berths, cranes, yards, power, security, and, crucially, somebody who's contractually responsible for running it well. And on that last item, Sierra Leone changed the rules.

Zach Martin

The Sierra Leone Ports and Harbours Authority, the SLPHA, is established under Act No. 29 of 2023. That act repealed the Ports Act No. 56 of 1964. Think about that for a second. For decades, the legal framework for the nation's ports dated from 1964, when the country was a few years past independence. The new act is described as cementing a shift from what's called a service port to a landlord port. I'll explain the difference in plain terms, because it matters for who can finance what.

Zach Martin

In a service port, the state authority does everything. It owns the land and the quay, it owns and operates the cranes, it employs the stevedores, it sets the tariffs and collects the revenue. Which means the authority also has to find the capital for every crane and every berth out of its own budget or by borrowing. In a landlord port, the authority owns the land and keeps the roles only a public body can play. Under the act, as the brief describes it, it reserves regulatory, pilotage, and harbor oversight for the state. Pilotage is guiding ships safely in and out of the harbor. The commercial operations, running the terminals and handling cargo, go to long term concessionaires who invest their own money and earn a return. Think of it like a stadium. The city owns the building and sets the rules for public safety. The team's operator runs the games and the concessions, and spends its own money on the scoreboard.

Zach Martin

Why does a concession structure matter to capital? Because it creates a contract an investor can read. A concessionaire commits money against a defined term, a defined area, and defined obligations, and a lender can underwrite those cash flows. In the vague old model, there's more political and budget risk sitting on top of every project. I'd add the obvious caveat from my own reading. A landlord structure is a framework, not a guarantee. Whether the concession terms are fair, whether the state collects its share, and whether the regulator really regulates, those are questions you answer by looking at the contracts and the enforcement, and I'm not able to give you the terms of those agreements here.

Zach Martin

Now, who's actually operating on the Freetown waterfront? Queen Elizabeth II Quay runs through dual concessions. First, Freetown Terminal Limited, which handles containerized cargo, linked to Africa Global Logistics and MSC. Those are two big names in container shipping and terminal operation. Second, Nectar Sierra Leone Bulk Terminal, known as NSBT, a joint venture between the Nectar Group and the Sierra Leone National Shipping Company. NSBT manages dry bulk and break bulk. Dry bulk is loose commodities poured or grabbed into a hold, grain, fertilizer, ore, that kind of thing. Break bulk is cargo that comes in pieces that aren't containerized. So you have two specialists splitting the quay by cargo type, and the state remains the landlord.

Zach Martin

Here's the milestone, and it's a hard asset you can measure. Between 2024 and 2025, NSBT, working with Eiffage Génie Civil and Beckett Rankine, completed construction of a major port expansion project at Queen Elizabeth II Quay, delivering a dedicated third berth. The numbers on that berth: it accommodates vessels up to 225 meters in length with an 11.5 meter draft. Draft is how deep a loaded ship sits below the waterline. And a berth that can handle an 11.5 meter draft needs enough water alongside, plus a quay structure that can bear the loads, which is the engineering part the contractor's team handled.

Zach Martin

Why does that matter in dollars? The brief says the new berth allows larger bulk carriers to discharge without costly offshore lightering. Let me unpack lightering, since it's a mechanism that makes the economics visible. When a ship is too big or too deep to come alongside, it anchors offshore, and smaller vessels, barges or lighters, shuttle the cargo to the quay. That means paying for extra vessels, extra handling steps, extra time at anchor, and more chances for damage and delay. Every day a chartered bulk carrier sits waiting costs money, and in general, shipowners pass the cost of waiting on to the cargo owner in the price. I'm describing how lightering works in general, and the brief characterizes it as costly. I don't have Freetown specific savings per tonne, so don't hold me to a number. But the direction is clear. A berth that lets the ship come to the cargo takes cost out of every import and export that moves over it.

Zach Martin

And the industry noticed. NSBT received the Special Achievement Award at the International Bulk Journal Awards in 2025 for this milestone. Now I'd treat an award as a signal, not an audit. Industry awards recognize an accomplishment. They don't tell you the return on the investment. But a completed, recognized berth is a different kind of evidence from a pledge. It's concrete in the water, and a lender evaluating the next project can point to it and say: there's a delivery track record here, with named contractors, on an actual schedule.

Zach Martin

Now let me add the second port story, because it shows the tension in the whole model. Up the coast, Pepel is a dedicated bulk loading port for iron ore. The 192 kilometer Pepel to Tonkolili railway connects the Tonkolili iron ore deposits to Pepel. The corridor is managed by Leone Rock Metal Group, with operations contracted to China Railway First Engineering Bureau. And in the middle of 2024, the corridor exceeded 1 million tons of iron ore moved in a month, using heavy haul AC diesel locomotives. A million tons a month. That's a serious throughput number.

Zach Martin

What I'd draw from Pepel is this, and I'll label it as my interpretation. Dedicated mineral export infrastructure moves fast when the cargo owner is also the investor. If you own the ore, you have every incentive to build the rail and the loading port, because it directly turns your reserves into revenue. A multipurpose public port like Freetown is different. It serves many cargo owners, importers of rice and fuel, exporters of various goods, shipping lines, and the people who'd benefit from it are numerous and none individually has the incentive to pay for the whole thing. That's the classic public goods problem. The brief frames it as foreign industrial capital rapidly mobilizing coastal logistics, in contrast to the slower public multi user port finance. I'd add that the landlord model is an attempt to close that gap, by getting a private operator to put up capital for a multi user facility in exchange for a concession.

Zach Martin

There's a flip side, and honesty requires I mention it. A dedicated corridor serves a dedicated cargo. The rail line from Tonkolili to Pepel is a hard asset, and a valuable one for the economy. But it doesn't, by itself, give a fish processor a cold room, or a farmer a way to export, or a small importer a lower freight cost. Whether the benefits of a mineral corridor spread through the economy is exactly the question Hirschman's backward and forward linkages ask, the theory the Bangura and Bongay paper uses. Do suppliers and processors grow up around the asset, or is it an enclave that exports ore and imports little else? The evidence I have supports the throughput figure, not an answer to the linkage question.

Zach Martin

Put the two stories side by side and a pattern emerges. At Freetown, an operator builds a berth, because the landlord framework gives it a defined concession and a defined return, and larger vessels can now discharge alongside. At Pepel, an industrial investor builds a rail and port chain because the cargo is its own. In both, the capital landed because somebody had a clear claim on the cash flow. That's the common thread with the cable and with the quota, and I'd put it as the rule of the whole hour: money follows enforceable rights over revenue. Sierra Leone's 2023 act, the concessions on the quay, and the open access rules in the cable terms of reference are three versions of the same move.

Zach Martin

And since we're in the world of plumbing, think about what a busy quay needs besides berths. It needs reliable power, which the cable terms of reference lists explicitly as a supporting facility to review for a landing station. It needs dredge depths maintained, because a natural harbor still silts. It needs digital systems for customs, which loops us right back to the cable. A berth that handles 225 meter ships is only as productive as the paperwork that clears the cargo off it. So the third berth and the second cable are really two chapters of the same project, one in steel and concrete, the other in glass.

Zach Martin

So far, we've talked about things you can pour concrete for or lay on the seabed. Now the harder asset. Fish. A biological asset that moves, reproduces, can be depleted, and belongs to nobody until somebody catches it. If a quay is a stadium, a fishery is more like a rookie draft class that can vanish if the league lets everyone take whoever they want. And here the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources has just been through a big strategic exercise.

Zach Martin

The document is called the Feed Salone Strategy for the Fisheries and Marine Resources Sectors in Sierra Leone. It's a 10 year strategy, owned by the Ministry and developed with support from the World Bank and the Government of Iceland. The vision it sets out is that by 2035, Sierra Leone will be a regional leader in sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. Feed Salone is the national food security agenda in the Medium Term National Development Plan 2024 to 2030, and fisheries are tied to it for a reason. According to the strategy, fisheries provide livelihoods to about 14 percent of the population and more than half of Sierra Leone's animal protein. Sierra Leoneans eat about 25 kilograms of fish per person per year, against a regional average of 11.2. And the fisheries are thought to yield about 250,000 metric tons of fish a year.

Zach Martin

Now the warning in the same executive summary. There are, quote, clear indications that some resources are declining due to climate change and environmental degradation, and the minister's foreword says her ministry is challenged by increased illegal and unsustainable fishing practices. That's a government document saying the asset base is eroding. Think about what that does to a balance sheet. Your biggest biological asset is shrinking, and it's the protein supply for half the nation's animal protein. It affects food security, livelihoods, and state revenue, as the strategy itself says.

Zach Martin

The strategy has three objectives. One, assess the country's fisheries and aquaculture resources and potential. Two, manage and enforce the sectors to ensure social, economic, and environmental sustainability and to prioritize national interests. Three, unlock the potential to increase national wealth. And the brief gives us the costed version of the plan, which I find the most revealing part. The overhaul is costed at between $27.9 million and $33.7 million across the three pillars. About $2 million for resource stock assessment. Between $6.9 million and $12.3 million for management and enforcement. And about $19 million for value unlocking and infrastructure.

Zach Martin

Look at that shape. Two million to find out what you've got. Seven to twelve million to protect it. Nineteen million to turn it into money. That ordering is the whole financial logic of the sector in three numbers. You can't price a fishery without a stock assessment, because nobody knows what the asset is. You can't keep the asset without enforcement. And you can't capture the value without things like landing sites and cold storage. And note the scale compared with where we started this hour. We were talking about a $550 billion annual global gap. This national plan is on the order of thirty million dollars. The gap at the macro level is enormous, and the bankable project at the national level is small enough that a well designed blend of grants and concessional money could cover it. That's the optimistic reading, and I'd mark it as mine.

Zach Martin

The most important institutional idea in the strategy is about property rights, and it came from the ground up. The consultations took place in Goderich, Tombo, Shenge, Gbondapi, Konakridee, and Freetown between March 24 and April 8, 2025, bringing together government officials, artisanal fishers, community leaders, aquaculture specialists, and civil society. Before that, there was a Fisheries Vision and Roadmap Retreat in Freetown on October 23 and 24, 2024. And the strategy recognizes, in its language, moving from an open access regime to a more restricted access model, noting that the latter offers a pathway to sustainability.

Zach Martin

I'll explain open access, because the phrase here is opposite to what it meant for the cable. Open access in a fishery means anyone can go out and catch as much as they can. And that sounds democratic, and it's a disaster for the resource, because each fisher's best strategy is to catch fish before the next fisher does. The classic tragedy of the commons. For a cable, open access means anyone can buy capacity on fair terms, which is good. For a fish stock, open access means nobody has a reason to hold back, which is bad. Same words, opposite effects, because one is a network you can share without depleting it and the other is a stock you deplete.

Zach Martin

The tools in the strategy's toolkit, per the brief, are these. Total Allowable Catches, or TACs, a cap on how much of a species can be taken in a season. Community fishing quotas. Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries, TURFs, which give a defined community the exclusive right to fish a defined area, and therefore a reason to look after it. And a roadmap toward Individual Transferable Quotas, ITQs, where rights to catch a share of the total are assigned to individuals or firms and can be traded. The strategy's box on artisanal fisheries talks about developing the role of community management associations in implementing territorial user rights.

Zach Martin

Now why does a quota matter to a financier? Because a quota is an asset with a number on it. If a fisher or a cooperative holds a durable, enforceable right to a defined share of a catch, that right can support a loan for a better boat, a processing line, a cold room. Without the right, the lender is financing someone who might not have fish to catch next year, and who can't stop a competitor from taking them. That's why I keep saying wet acreage doesn't become a balance sheet until the rights are defined. I will say, the strategy describes ITQs as a roadmap destination and not an immediate switch, and a sensible one. Quotas in a place with a big artisanal sector, with many small boats, require data and enforcement capacity that have to be built first. If you allocate rights you can't police, you've just written a certificate.

Zach Martin

Which brings us to leakage. The Ocean Panel paper cites work by Sumaila and colleagues estimating that 8 to 14 million tonnes of unreported fish catches enter the global market every year. The estimated annual loss throughout the economy is $26 to $50 billion, with lost tax revenues of $2 to $4 billion. That's global. It's about illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, called IUU. The cost to a country like Sierra Leone is that fish leave its waters without being counted, taxed, or landed. So the enforcement pillar in the strategy is not a nice to have. It's the revenue protection part of the plan.

Zach Martin

What does the enforcement package look like, per the brief? Upgrading the Joint Maritime Committee, the body that coordinates maritime enforcement. Enforcing Vessel Monitoring Systems and Automatic Identification Systems, the transponder and tracking tech that lets authorities see where industrial vessels are. Auditing ship registries so that blacklisted industrial vessels can be de-flagged, using the FAO Port State Measures Agreement, which lets a port say no to vessels suspected of IUU fishing. And formally empowering Community Management Associations, the CMAs, with legally admissible surveillance training. That last piece is clever. Artisanal fishers are on the water every day and see things. Training them so that what they observe holds up as evidence turns a thin patrol budget into a wide network of eyes.

Zach Martin

And notice how the pieces connect to what we covered earlier. Port State Measures are enforced at ports, so the landlord port framework and the berth operators are part of the fisheries enforcement chain. Vessel tracking data needs bandwidth, so the cable matters. Quota accounting needs electronic landing records, which need connectivity and power. This isn't a set of separate sectors. It's one shoreline system, and a weak link anywhere lets value leak out.

Zach Martin

Then there's the downstream half, post harvest, and it's where the value gets made. The strategy allocates over $5 million, per the brief, to cold storage and landing site upgrades, aimed at cutting post harvest spoilage and meeting export hygiene standards for higher margin international markets. A fish caught in the tropics and landed without ice and power starts losing value in hours. It can be sold locally, and about 45 percent of production is, according to the strategy. But it can't reach a higher paying export market without a cold chain and a certified hygiene system. And here's where the data and the paperwork matter again. The competent authority for fish quality assurance has to certify the product, and a buyer's lender wants to see the certification before it finances the shipment.

Zach Martin

Aquaculture sits in this picture too, and I'd give it a measured mention. The strategy says it's an emerging sector, currently focused mainly on inland production of Nile tilapia and African catfish. It sees potential given the coastline and climate, but says realizing it will require additional infrastructure and an enabling environment that attracts local and foreign direct investment, with strategic spatial planning as an important first step. Spatial planning is another unglamorous item. It's deciding which waters and lands can be used for what, so an investor isn't buying into a legal dispute.

Zach Martin

So let me pull the whole hour together, and I'll try to do it the way a football coach would diagram it on a whiteboard. The macro picture is a gap of about $550 billion a year, with official ocean aid under 1 percent of the total and shrinking with the 7.1 percent fall in 2024, and with far more money flowing to harmful subsidies than to sustainable work. The finance industry is responding with better rulebooks. The updated Ocean Investment Protocol from September 2026 pushes central banks, regulators, and supervisors to treat ocean risk as financial risk, and One Ocean Finance is inviting banks and insurers to help design blended vehicles. Those are the plays being called from the press box.

Zach Martin

But the plays get run on the field, and on Sierra Leone's field I see four pieces of line play. A statute, Act No. 29 of 2023, turning the port into a landlord model with concessionaires. A completed third berth at Queen Elizabeth II Quay that takes 225 meter vessels and lets cargo be discharged alongside instead of lightered. A feasibility process for a second cable, off Meta's 2Africa system, because the current single landing station is aging and was cut off in March 2024. And a fisheries strategy that shifts from open access toward quotas and surveillance, with a costed plan of $27.9 million to $33.7 million. Each of those is a way of making an ocean asset legible to a lender.

Zach Martin

Now, a word about what I don't know, because a good broadcaster tells you where the tape ends. I can't tell you the contract terms of the port concessions. I can't tell you whether the second cable will be financed, by whom, or when. I can't tell you whether the fisheries strategy will be funded at the level it's costed. And the Bangura and Bongay paper finds statistical links, but links aren't a forecast. Sierra Leone's recorded ocean exports were under half a billion dollars in the 2018 data they used, and Nigeria's were over $1.5 billion. Closing that gap is a multi year build, not a press release.

Zach Martin

The deepest lesson, I think, is the one the Ocean Panel authors put in their own words. Before the private money comes, countries need financing for the infrastructure and technology to produce and apply a better regulatory framework. Capital doesn't flow into raw ocean potential. It flows into defined property rights, reliable power, certified landing stations, adequate dredge depths, and transparent accounting. So closing the ocean finance gap means treating a coastal sea not as an endless grant recipient but as a balance sheet, with audited data, institutional contracts, and resilient shoreline plumbing. If you want to watch whether it's working, don't watch the pledges. Watch the berth utilization numbers, the cable redundancy, the stock assessments, the landing records, and the quotas that are actually enforced.

Zach Martin

That's our hour on Ocean Capital. I'm Zach Martin, here on KMKT IR Hub Radio. Next time you hear a big number about the blue economy, ask the offensive line question: what's holding the pocket? Who owns the right, who keeps the books, and what happens when the one cable goes dark? Thanks for listening, and I'll see you back here for the next one.