Blue Balance Sheets: Closing the Global Ocean Finance Gap

Zach Martin

Let's start with a number that doesn't sound like an ocean number at all. Three. In March 2024, three major subsea cables off West Africa were cut. According to the reporting behind this episode, that severed national connectivity in Sierra Leone and paralyzed banking, trade, and government systems. Nobody dredged anything. No ship ran aground in front of a ministry. A few strands of glass on the seabed went dark, and a country's financial life stalled.

Zach Martin

I want you to hold that picture for the next hour, because it's the best doorway I know into what this show is about. Welcome to Ocean Capital, on KMKT IR Hub Radio. I'm Zach Martin. This show treats the ocean as a balance sheet. That means ports, cables, shipping lanes, fisheries, shoreline infrastructure, and the money that has to flow into all of it. Today we're doing a big update on where that money stands for 2024 to 2026. We'll keep coming back to one country, Sierra Leone, because it shows you what the global numbers look like when they land on one coastline.

Zach Martin

If you listened to our earlier episode on blue finance, you'll remember two ideas. One was ocean rights as wet acreage, the notion that a slice of sea can be defined, measured, and financed like a parcel of land. The other was Sierra Leone's exposure from relying on a single subsea cable landing. Today we move both forward. We have fresher macro numbers, new instruments like outcome based bonds and large debt swaps, and concrete milestones in Sierra Leone from late 2024 through 2025. We'll look at a policy framework, a fisheries strategy, a port expansion with some fascinating engineering, and a feasibility push for a second cable.

Zach Martin

First, the size of the thing. The OECD's work, as cited in the World Bank's PROBLUE annual report for 2025, values the global ocean economy at about $2.6 trillion in 2020. It sustains around 133 million full time jobs, and the OECD expects it to double by 2050. The creator brief for this episode adds that it's projected to pass $3 trillion by 2030. The Ocean Panel's 2025 working paper says that in terms of gross value added, the ocean economy would have ranked fifth among the world's economies in 2019, and seventh in 2020. And more than three billion people rely on the ocean for their livelihoods. Whether you're a coach or a banker, that's a big base to build on.

Zach Martin

Now the uncomfortable part. A big base isn't the same as a funded base. The High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, which people call the Ocean Panel, published a working paper in 2025 with a blunt headline finding. Current financial flows fall short of an estimated $550 billion per year needed to support the sustainable ocean economy. The brief tells us that figure runs through 2030, spans six core investment areas, and sits inside a range of $383 billion to $717 billion. So when I say $550 billion, hear it as a central estimate with real uncertainty around it, not a precise invoice.

Zach Martin

Other estimates exist, and they don't all line up. An earlier estimate by Johansen and Vestvik put the cost of delivering Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, at $174.72 billion annually. That goal remains the most underfunded of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. And the World Bank's PROBLUE report, in its foreword, cites an annual financing gap of $150 billion. Those are different yardsticks measuring different slices, so please don't subtract one from another and call it analysis. What they share is the direction. Every serious estimate says the ocean is asked to do far more than it's paid to do.

Zach Martin

Let me give you a way to hold this. Think about a gym membership you pay for and never use, versus a training plan you actually fund every week. The ocean economy right now looks a lot like a facility with enormous potential and an irregular training budget. Money shows up in bursts, in pilots, in announcements. What the field is trying to build is the boring weekly deposit, the habit that compounds. That's the theme of this hour. Where do the deposits come from, who gets access to them, and what has to be built so they can actually land?

Zach Martin

Here's where the deposits are small. Official development assistance directed to sustainable ocean activities reached $2.4 billion in 2022, up from $1.2 billion in 2010. That's real growth, doubling in a dozen years. But it's less than one percent of all official development assistance. And that total is now shrinking. The Ocean Panel paper notes total ODA fell 7.1 percent in 2024, the first decline after five consecutive years of growth. Philanthropy is similarly capped, with ocean funding at about $2.8 billion, again under one percent of global philanthropy, per the brief.

Zach Martin

Now put those figures next to the other column of the ledger. The brief cites UNEP reporting that about $7 trillion per year flows globally into nature negative finance. Harmful fisheries subsidies total about $22 billion annually, a number the Ocean Panel attributes to Sumaila and colleagues in 2019. The OECD found that 65 percent of all government support to fisheries between 2020 and 2022 carried a risk of encouraging unsustainable fishing in the absence of effective management. Fossil fuel subsidies reached $1.1 trillion in 2023. So the biggest lever in this whole story isn't inventing new money. It's redirecting existing money that's currently pointed the wrong way. The Ocean Panel says exactly that, and I think it's the most important sentence in the whole paper, even if it's the least exciting one.

Zach Martin

And there's a leak in the bucket too. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, usually shortened to IUU, means that eight to 14 million tonnes of unreported catch likely enter the global market every year. The Ocean Panel cites an estimated annual loss across the economy of $26 billion to $50 billion, and lost tax revenue of $2 billion to $4 billion. Remember that tax revenue figure. A government that can't see what's coming out of its water can't tax it, can't finance against it, and can't prove to an investor that it's managing it. We'll come back to that, because in Sierra Leone it turns into a very practical question about monitoring systems.

Zach Martin

One more piece of the macro picture before we get into instruments. Geography. The brief says the Asia Pacific region accounts for 56 percent of global ocean financing needs. Meanwhile African coastal nations, small island developing states, and least developed countries face acute borrowing premiums, thin domestic capital markets, and often no sovereign credit rating at all. The Ocean Panel highlights a mismatch here. Climate vulnerable communities and countries with high debt burdens have neither adequate access to grants and concessional capital nor to commercial finance, yet they are also home to the majority of global marine biodiversity. So the places holding the most ocean assets are often the places with the most expensive and least available capital. Hold onto that mismatch. It's the engine of everything that follows.

Zach Martin

So how does the world try to close a gap this size? Not with one magic product. In June 2025, two events set the stage. The Blue Economy and Finance Forum met in Monaco on June 7 and 8. Then the third United Nations Ocean Conference, co hosted by France and Costa Rica, ran in Nice from June 9 to 13. The Ocean Panel paper was written to feed those discussions, and the brief frames the whole moment as a push to move ocean finance from scattered grants to standardized, bankable market structures. Think of it like moving from a pile of loose receipts to a proper ledger. Same money, but now an auditor can read it.

Zach Martin

The PROBLUE report describes the diplomatic mood after Nice. It says UN member states committed to concrete measures, from science based ocean governance to cutting marine pollution and decarbonizing maritime transport. It also says momentum from the conference produced significant progress toward ratification of the high seas biodiversity treaty and the World Trade Organization agreement on fisheries subsidies, bringing both into force in early fiscal year 2026. I'd flag that as the report's own account, from a World Bank program with an interest in telling a hopeful story. Still, a subsidies agreement matters to this episode, because we just saw how large harmful fishery subsidies are.

Zach Martin

Now the instruments. Start with the plainest one, the blue bond. The Ocean Panel paper reports cumulative blue bond issuance of at least $10.4 billion. The brief adds that more than 80 institutions have signed on to the Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Principles and related guidelines from ICMA and the IFC, and that ocean economy funds have raised over $76 billion since 2015. Those numbers are growing, but set them beside $550 billion a year. Even the optimistic reading says the instruments are real and the volume is still small. The Ocean Panel says plainly that the amounts raised fall far short of the needs.

Zach Martin

The newer idea, and the one I find the most intellectually interesting, is the outcome based bond. The headline example is Indonesia's Coral Bond. The OECD describes it as the World Bank's first outcome based financing instrument for ocean biodiversity, and the brief says it was structured with the Global Environment Facility, BNP Paribas, and IUCN. Here's the mechanism, step by step. Investors put in money. They give up the coupon payments a bond would normally pay. That money helps fund conservation across five million hectares of marine protected areas. At maturity, investors earn a success payment only if independently verified ecological metrics are met. The metrics named in the brief are IUCN Green List status, live coral cover, and fish biomass.

Zach Martin

Why does that structure matter? Because it changes who carries the risk of a promise. A traditional conservation grant pays for effort. You fund rangers, boats, workshops, and you hope the reef improves. An outcome bond pays for results. If the coral cover doesn't recover, the success payment doesn't happen. That pushes everyone in the chain toward proof. And proof is the theme of the infrastructure half of this episode. An outcome bond is only as good as the measurement behind it, and measurement is physical work. Someone has to go into the water, count, record, and verify. Keep that thought, because we'll apply it to Sierra Leone's mangroves.

Zach Martin

Then there are debt conversions, the debt for nature swaps. The basic move is that a country's expensive debt gets bought back or refinanced on better terms, and in exchange the country commits to protect marine areas. The brief traces an escalation in size. Early prototypes include Seychelles, with a $15 million blue bond alongside a $21.6 million debt swap. Then come the mega transactions. Belize, at $364 million. Gabon, a $500 million debt for nature swap that the brief says freed $163 million for marine conservation. And Ecuador's Galapagos conversion at $1.6 billion, backed by guarantees from the Inter American Development Bank and the US Development Finance Corporation.

Zach Martin

Notice the pattern in that list. Guarantees, first loss money, concessional anchors. These deals don't happen because markets spontaneously love marine protected areas. They happen because a public institution takes the first hit if things go wrong, which makes the private part investable. That's blended finance, in plain terms. The brief gives two more examples. The Global Fund for Coral Reefs runs a $90 million grant incubator and a $135 million blended investment fund, anchored by $125 million in first loss capital from the Green Climate Fund. And Mirova's Sustainable Ocean Fund mobilized $132 million for sustainable seafood, circular plastic reduction, and management of marine protected areas.

Zach Martin

There's another leverage story hiding in the PROBLUE report. It says that in fiscal year 2025, every dollar invested in PROBLUE initiatives catalyzed $82 in World Bank financing across 38 operations, together worth more than $5.9 billion. Of that, $3.5 billion came from the International Development Association, $333 million from the IBRD, $1.6 billion from client governments, and just $20 million from private financing. I like that last number as a reality check. Even in a showcase result, the private slice is a rounding error next to the public one. The word catalyzed is doing a lot of work, and it's a claim from the program about its own influence. Treat it as a useful signal, not an audited causal result.

Zach Martin

The OECD adds a plain, almost dull, observation that I think matters more than any bond structure. Committed money and disbursed money are different things. In 2022, ocean related aid commitments to least developed countries were about $967 million, but disbursements were about $369 million. For Africa as a whole, about $893 million committed and $509 million disbursed. A promise on a spreadsheet isn't a pump running or a berth built. The OECD recommends greater predictability and notes that annual spikes in ocean aid are driven by a few large individual projects. So even before we argue about instruments, there's a reliability problem in the plumbing.

Zach Martin

Here's the coaching takeaway from this chapter. When a field is hungry for capital, the temptation is to chase the flashy instrument. The coral bond, the mega swap, the headline. But look at what each of those structures depends on. A verified baseline. A reliable measurement system. A government that can sign, report, and follow through. The instruments are the visible top of the pyramid. The foundation is institutional capacity and physical infrastructure, and that's the hidden part this episode keeps pointing at.

Zach Martin

Now I want to slow down and look at who designs these rules, because a financing framework isn't neutral. It encodes a view of what the ocean is for. There's a 2026 critique from the Inclusive Society Institute that I want to walk through carefully, and I want to label it as a critique, an argument, not a settled fact. It says Western dominated blue finance frameworks carry an ecological conservation first bias. By treating ocean space mainly as a global public good or an environmental sink, the argument goes, international rulemaking can sideline the sovereign development priorities of African states. The risk it describes is a pair of traps. One is being locked into raw material extraction. The other is being asked to carry uncompensated preservation.

Zach Martin

Let me make that concrete with an analogy. Imagine your neighbors tell you that your backyard is a vital wildlife corridor for the whole street. They're right that it matters. They'd like you to keep it untouched, and they'll applaud you for it. But you also need a workshop, a place to store tools, and an income. If all the praise comes without capital for the workshop, you've been handed a duty and not a business. That's the shape of the complaint. And to be fair, the other side of the argument has real evidence too. The Ocean Panel and the OECD both stress that some ocean protection is essentially a public good that will always need dedicated public financing. Protection and production aren't enemies. The dispute is about sequencing and who's paying for what.

Zach Martin

The African response, as the brief describes it, is a framework people call the Trinity. African institutions, aligning AIMS 2050, the Lomé Charter, and the African Union's Agenda 2063, advocate redefining blue finance around three linked ideas. Livelihood security, industrial upgrading, and governance equality. The practical translation is that blue capital should fund domestic processing facilities, industrial equipment, cold storage, and protein supply security, rather than merely creating what the brief calls unmonitored paper parks. A paper park is a protected area that exists on a map and a press release, but has no patrol boat, no fuel, and no enforcement. You can see why an investor focused on verified outcomes and an African ministry focused on industrial capacity might actually agree here. Both of them dislike a park nobody can measure.

Zach Martin

The OECD's own guidance, interestingly, leans in the same direction on a few points. It says established sectors like fisheries and maritime transport warrant continued support, especially activities that improve sustainability and management and activities that generate economic value. It says ocean protection is the priority for concessional finance because the private capital isn't there without a mature nature market. And it says emerging sectors, like marine biotechnology and offshore renewable energy, are risky and unfamiliar territory for donors, so governance frameworks and capacity come first. So the donor world's official guidance isn't purely conservation first. The tension is real, but it isn't a simple East versus West or North versus South split.

Zach Martin

Let's talk about the access problem, because this is where the philosophical argument meets arithmetic. The Ocean Panel lists barriers. No universally agreed taxonomy for sustainable ocean finance. Inadequate disclosure and traceability. Limited capacity, high transaction costs, and low and slow return profiles, especially for community based and small scale projects in least developed countries and small island states. And policy misalignment, like those harmful subsidies, which fail to de risk and attract investment. Notice how many of those are not about the ocean at all. They're about paperwork, data, and institutions. A taxonomy is a shared dictionary. Without it, an investor in Paris and a fishery manager in Freetown can't even agree on what counts.

Zach Martin

The OECD makes a related point about domestic money that I found striking. Domestic public resources are by far the largest source of financing for sustainable development, ocean included. Yet in 2022, just $7.5 million out of $3.5 billion in ocean related aid commitments went toward helping countries mobilize their own revenue. It also observes that public spending on the ocean doesn't fall neatly along ministry lines, so governments often don't know how much they're spending, how effective it is, or what opportunities they're missing. And in some cases, the OECD says, countries have an ocean economy strategy that doesn't include a budget for implementing it. I'm not saying that describes any particular country. I'm saying it's the failure mode every strategy document should be tested against.

Zach Martin

The OECD even points to practical tools. The World Bank's Blue Public Expenditure Review guidance note helps governments find three things. Insufficient spending on the ocean. Excessive spending on activities that create negative side effects. And missed opportunities, such as poorly designed taxes on ocean sectors. Budget tagging lets a government see ocean related spending across ministries. None of this makes headlines the way a half billion dollar swap does. But if I had to pick which helps a coastal country more over ten years, a one off swap or a clean budget that tracks where ocean money goes, I know which one I'd bet on. Discipline beats drama.

Zach Martin

Now let me connect this debate to how the ocean gets used in a place like Sierra Leone. The question the Global South critique asks is simple. When capital arrives, what does it build? A patrol system and a protected area that exports nothing? Or a cold chain, a port, a processing plant, and a protected area that works because the people next to it have a stable income? The strongest version of the argument says the answer isn't either or. Conservation that people can't afford to respect doesn't last, and industry that depletes its own resource doesn't last either. The financing frameworks that win will be the ones that finance both and can prove they did.

Zach Martin

One more voice for balance. At the 2025 UN Ocean Conference, GOAL Sierra Leone presented its Blue Economy Programme at the Sierra Leone Blue Economy Expo, a side event. Benjamin Bockarie, the Program Coordinator for the Blue Economy, called for strategic investment in sustainable fisheries, marine conservation, and circular economy initiatives, and for partnerships that, in his words, leverage technological innovation and community engagement to unlock the full potential of Sierra Leone's coastal and marine resources. That's an NGO's pitch, so read it as advocacy. But notice the mix. Fisheries, conservation, and circular economy in one sentence. That's the Trinity logic showing up on the ground, in the same breath.

Zach Martin

Time to zoom into Sierra Leone. I'll start with the resource base, using the figures in the brief, and I'll flag that sources give ranges, not single points. Sierra Leone has an exclusive economic zone of roughly 157,000 to 160,000 square kilometers. A continental shelf of about 30,000 square kilometers. A coastline of roughly 360 to 400 kilometers. And a six nautical mile Inshore Exclusion Zone reserved for artisanal fleets. That last item is a property line, drawn on water. It says the nearshore belongs to small scale fishers. Recall wet acreage from our earlier episode. This is a version of it, a defined space with a defined user class.

Zach Martin

Now the people. According to the brief, fisheries generate about 12 percent of Sierra Leone's GDP and employ between 500,000 and 800,000 people directly and indirectly. That's roughly 14 to 25 percent of the population, depending on the estimate. Fish supplies somewhere between 50 percent and more than 70 percent of the nation's animal protein. Sierra Leoneans consume about 25 kilograms of fish per capita each year, more than double the West African average of 11.2. And the current annual yield is about 250,000 metric tons. When I read that, I don't see a sector. I see a food system and a labor market and a tax base all sitting on the same water. If you wanted to design a national balance sheet where the ocean is the biggest line item, this is what it'd look like.

Zach Martin

Here's how the government has been trying to organize that balance sheet. The first milestone is in November 2024. The Ministry of Planning and Economic Development, with support from UNDP, launched the Blue Economy Strategic Framework and National Action Plan. UNDP describes it as a milestone reflecting a transformative vision. The brief says it establishes a Blue Economy Secretariat and six pillars: food security, marine transport, coastal protection, maritime security, governance, and science and research. Pause on that list. Marine transport sits next to food security. Maritime security sits next to science. The ocean is being treated as one connected system, not as a fish ministry and a ports ministry that rarely talk.

Zach Martin

The second milestone is the Feed Salone Strategy for the Fisheries and Marine Resources Sectors, released in 2025 by the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, along with the World Bank and the Government of Iceland. The minister is Princess Dugba. It's a ten year roadmap, 2025 to 2035, with a vision statement that reads, quoting the document, by 2035 Sierra Leone will be a regional leader in sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, setting a benchmark for ecological stewardship. It covers marine governance, artisanal and industrial fisheries, and aquaculture. Feed Salone, if you haven't heard it, ties the ocean to the national food agenda. That's a smart framing, because it makes fisheries about feeding people first and exporting second.

Zach Martin

And then there's the number that grabs attention. Minister Dugba projected that formalizing fisheries, deploying cold storage, and achieving international sanitary export certification could unlock up to $700 million annually in fish and shrimp exports. I want to treat that carefully. It's a ministerial projection, an upper bound with the words up to in front of it, not a forecast from an independent model. But look at the three ingredients in her sentence. Formalization. Cold storage. Export certification. None of them is a fish. All of them are infrastructure and institutions. The value isn't in the water. It's in the systems between the water and the buyer.

Zach Martin

That brings me to a piece of research I think every blue finance enthusiast should read slowly. The brief describes recent empirical work using Granger causality analysis on data from 1990 to 2023. It found that blue natural capital does not automatically translate into GDP growth in Sierra Leone, because of profound structural bottlenecks. The authors tie this to Hirschman's unbalanced growth theory. Here's my plain English version. Albert Hirschman argued that development tends to happen when investment in one area creates pressure and opportunity for related areas, the forward and backward linkages. A fishing boat that lands fish creates demand for ice, fuel, nets, and repair on one side, and for processing, transport, and sales on the other. If those links don't exist, the catch goes to waste or leaves the country raw, and the value is captured elsewhere.

Zach Martin

The finding cuts against a comfortable story. The comfortable story says a country with rich marine resources just needs investors to show up. The research says natural capital sitting in the sea doesn't convert itself. Something has to be built to carry it, and the building has to connect to the rest of the economy. I like to say the same thing about habits. Having a gym doesn't make you fit. Having a plan, a schedule, and a way to track progress does. Resources are the gym membership. Linkages are the workouts.

Zach Martin

There's also the question of governance at the water's edge. The brief notes that the Sierra Leone Ports and Harbours Authority was created under Act No. 29 of 2023, formalizing Freetown's move to a landlord port model. In a landlord port, the public authority owns the land and basic infrastructure and leases operations to private concessionaires. It's the same logic as the blue finance tools we discussed. The state keeps the long term asset and the strategic role, and private operators bring capital and operating discipline. If it's done well, you get investment without surrendering the shoreline. If it's done badly, you get a concession that doesn't serve the public. The contract terms matter enormously, and I can't tell you from the sources how any specific lease is structured, so I won't pretend to.

Zach Martin

Let me also say something about the sequence that I think is underrated. Sierra Leone put out a cross government blue economy framework in late 2024, then a fisheries strategy in 2025, with a ports authority law already on the books from 2023. That's the right order of operations for a country that wants to attract capital. Frameworks first, then sector strategies, then infrastructure. The OECD warned about strategies without budgets. The next test is whether these documents get financed and implemented. I can't tell you from today's sources how much funding is attached to either one, and I'd encourage you to be skeptical of anyone who claims they can without showing the line items.

Zach Martin

Now we get to the part of the show I love, the hidden infrastructure. The brief organizes it into three layers. Shoreline and port engineering. Digital undersea plumbing. And monitoring, traceability, and blue carbon assets. Think of them as the hardware, the nervous system, and the audit trail of an ocean economy. Let's start with the hardware, and I'm going to take my time, because the engineering is a great example of how a bankable asset gets built on difficult ground.

Zach Martin

Freetown sits on what the Beckett Rankine paper calls the West African coast's largest natural harbour. A deepwater natural harbour is a gift. But a gift of depth doesn't mean a gift of solid ground. The paper was presented at the 35th PIANC World Congress in 2024, by Beckett Rankine and Eiffage Génie Civil Marine, and it covers the expansion of the Nectar Sierra Leone Bulk Terminal, operated by the UK's Nectar Group. The expansion added a 225 meter third berth. A berth is where a ship ties up. A longer one means more or bigger vessels can be handled, but only if the quay holds up under the weight of cargo, cranes, and equipment.

Zach Martin

Here's the engineering puzzle. The brief describes the geology as the volcanic Freetown Layered Basic Complex, interbedded with very soft Bullom Group marine clays. Picture a layer cake where some layers are hard rock and others are like wet, compressed pudding. Build a heavy wall on that, and the pudding layers can squeeze and shift, while the rock layers don't. That kind of ground is hard to predict. So the engineers couldn't treat the site as a simple block of the same material. They had to find out what was actually down there, and then design around it.

Zach Martin

The first step was investigation. The contractors mobilized offshore Cone Penetration Testing, and the brief notes they brought that capability in from Guinea. A cone penetration test pushes an instrumented probe into the seabed and records how much resistance it meets as it goes down. That gives you a profile of hard and soft layers. I think that logistics detail is telling. The specialist equipment wasn't sitting in Freetown. Part of what a country pays for, when it builds in a place without a deep marine construction ecosystem, is the cost of fetching capability from the neighbors.

Zach Martin

Then the solutions. The sources list several. Extended combi wall sheet piles. That's a type of retaining wall system built from steel pipes and sheets driven into the ground, here extended deeper. Stone columns and vibro compaction. In general terms, those are ground improvement techniques, where you densify or reinforce weak soil by installing columns of stone or by vibrating the ground so it packs more tightly. And hydraulic sand dredging, which the paper describes with the term rainbowing, the practice of spraying dredged sand in an arc from a vessel to place fill. I'm describing these in general terms, and I won't claim to know the exact design calculations the team used. What matters for our purposes is the pattern. Investigate the ground, reinforce the weak zones, and fill with engineered material.

Zach Martin

And then something I find almost poetic. The wall movement was monitored hourly, using automated prisms and tiltmeters. A prism is a surveying target that instruments can measure precisely, and a tiltmeter detects tiny changes in angle. So a structure that's meant to hold still was being watched, every hour, for any sign it was moving. That's measurement as a form of insurance. If the wall shifts, you know quickly, and you respond before it becomes a failure. You'll notice this echoes the coral bond. Verified metrics, independently measured. The same principle shows up in a quay wall in Freetown and in a marine park in Indonesia. Don't trust, measure.

Zach Martin

The contract structure was also notable. The project used an NEC4 Option C target cost contract with Early Contractor Involvement. In plain English, a target cost contract sets a target price, and the client and contractor share the gains if costs come in under it and share the pain if they go over. Early contractor involvement means the builder is brought into the design conversation before the design is frozen. On ground as uncertain as Freetown's, that's sensible logic. The people who will face the soft clay should talk to the designers early. The sources don't give final costs or schedule outcomes in what I have, so I can't tell you whether the structure delivered savings. I can tell you the choice fits the risk.

Zach Martin

One more detail, because it connects the port to the energy and climate conversation. To help with power reliability, the Nectar terminal installed a rooftop solar array rated at 120 kilowatts peak, along with an 80 kilowatt hour battery storage facility. Those are modest numbers in global terms, and I'm not going to oversell them. But for a port, power reliability is a financial matter. A crane that can't run is revenue that can't be earned. A small solar and battery system is a way of buying down one operational risk. Put it all together and you see what a bankable port asset really is. Ground that holds, contracts that share risk, power that stays on, and a public authority under a clear law.

Zach Martin

Now the second layer, the digital undersea plumbing. Return to March 2024. Sierra Leone's digital economy has depended entirely on one submarine fiber landing, the Africa Coast to Europe cable, known as ACE, which the brief says was funded by the World Bank's West Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program in 2010. It's reaching the end of its operational design life. When the three cuts off West Africa happened that March, the single path meant the country's connectivity was severed, with banking, trade, and government systems paralyzed, per the brief. This is the single point of failure I raised in our earlier episode, now with a date attached.

Zach Martin

What's being done? The Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation issued terms of reference, in documents dated around January 2025, for a feasibility study to land a second submarine cable. It sits under the World Bank's $50 million Sierra Leone Digital Transformation Project. The terms of reference put the problem plainly. Quoting, the reliance of the country on a single submarine cable poses significant risks to its national connectivity. That sentence, in an official procurement document, is the government naming the risk in writing. That's a real step, because a risk that's named in a funded study is one step closer to a risk that's priced.

Zach Martin

The brief adds more texture. A national consortium of telecom operators, listed as Orange, Africell, QCell, Leonecom, and Zoodlabs, is evaluating a branch off Meta's 2Africa cable. And in July 2025, a high level Sierra Leonean delegation visited Guinea, as reported by TechAfrica News, to assess feasibility. The reported topics were cross border terrestrial redundancy, landing site logistics, and public private partnership models. Let me be careful about the word evaluating. These are studies and explorations. I don't have evidence in these sources of a signed construction contract, a route that's been finalized, or a landing date. A feasibility mission is a promising early step. It's not a cable.

Zach Martin

Why would a delegation go to Guinea? I'd read it this way, and this is my interpretation, not a reported finding. Redundancy isn't only about having a second cable. It's about having a second path. If a country's data can travel overland to another country's landing station when its own landing fails, the system is more resilient. That's presumably what cross border terrestrial redundancy is meant to explore. Think of it like having two exits from a building. It isn't enough to have two doors if both open into the same hallway. The route diversity matters as much as the count.

Zach Martin

And this connects to ocean capital, not just telecom. Digital connectivity is the nervous system of every other blue asset. Vessel tracking, port scheduling, export paperwork, mobile payments for fishers and fish traders, satellite data uploads. When the link fails, the port, the fishery, and the bank all feel it. If you're an investor looking at Freetown's port or at a fisheries export chain, a single cable is a hidden operating risk sitting underneath your model. A second landing is an infrastructure investment that lowers the risk premium on everything else.

Zach Martin

The third layer is the one I'd call the audit trail. It's the monitoring, traceability, and carbon asset layer, and it's where the verification gap lives. The brief says that turning ocean potential into bankable blue bonds requires robust Monitoring, Control, and Surveillance systems, vessel tracking through VMS and AIS, and cold chain certification to prevent illegal fishing and post harvest spoilage. VMS and AIS are tracking systems that report where vessels are. Cold chain certification is proof that fish stayed cold from boat to buyer. Recall the numbers from the start. Eight to 14 million tonnes of unreported catch a year worldwide, and $2 billion to $4 billion in lost tax revenue. The less you can see, the less you can tax and the less you can finance.

Zach Martin

And think back to Minister Dugba's three ingredients for the up to $700 million export projection. Formalization, cold storage, sanitary export certification. Those are verification systems in disguise. A buyer abroad wants proof the fish is legal and safe. A lender wants proof the revenue is real. A bond investor wants proof the stock is recovering. All three are asking for the same thing, a trustworthy record. Building that record isn't glamorous, but it's the difference between an ocean full of potential and an ocean that can borrow money.

Zach Martin

Finally, blue carbon. The brief says Sierra Leone has between 18,000 and more than 100,000 hectares of coastal mangroves, a wide range that itself tells you the mapping is uncertain. It cites about 8.4 tons of carbon per hectare, and an estimated $3.5 million to $7.7 million annually in avoided carbon emissions. Those are modest sums compared to the $550 billion global need, so I wouldn't call mangroves a silver bullet. But they matter, because mangroves protect shorelines and nurse fish, so a healthy one supports several balance sheet lines at once.

Zach Martin

The catch is that monetization through certified carbon or biodiversity credits is currently stalled, according to the brief. The reasons aren't about the mangroves themselves. They're the lack of local testing laboratories, the lack of carbon registry integration, and the absence of formalized marine spatial planning. Marine spatial planning is the process of deciding, on a map, which parts of the sea are used for what. So the asset exists, the carbon is in the mud, and the value is locked behind missing laboratories, missing registry links, and a missing map. That's the pattern again. The ocean provides. The infrastructure of proof is what's missing.

Zach Martin

So let me pull the whole hour together the way I'd coach a business owner. One. The ocean economy is large, around $2.6 trillion in 2020 by the OECD's reckoning, and it's underfunded against estimates like the Ocean Panel's $550 billion a year. Two. The money that exists is often pointed the wrong way, so redirecting subsidies matters as much as raising new capital. Three. New instruments, from the coral bond to the Galapagos conversion, share one feature. They reward verified results, and they lean on public guarantees to make private money comfortable. Four. The Global South's critique is a reminder that capital should build livelihoods and industrial capacity, not only protected areas on paper.

Zach Martin

Five, and this is the Sierra Leone lesson. The country has done a lot of the right early work. A framework launched in November 2024, a ten year fisheries roadmap in 2025, a landlord port law in 2023, an expanded bulk terminal built on difficult ground, a feasibility push for a second cable. None of that is finished, and none of it guarantees returns. The research the brief cites says natural capital doesn't turn itself into growth. Linkages do. So the question I'd watch over the next two years isn't whether another strategy gets published. It's whether cold storage gets built, whether a second cable gets contracted, whether vessel tracking and labs and registries come online, and whether the budgets show up next to the documents.

Zach Martin

Here's your small, compounding takeaway. When you hear any ocean finance announcement, ask three questions. What's being measured? Who verifies it? And what physical system carries the value from the water to the buyer? If the answers are clear, you're looking at something that can compound. If they're vague, you're looking at a press release. Discipline over drama, small improvements over big promises. That's Ocean Capital. I'm Zach Martin, and I'll see you on the next one.