Blue Finance: Turning Ocean Potential into Investable Assets

Zach Martin

Here's a number that sounds like a lot of wealth. Sierra Leone's exclusive economic zone covers roughly 215,611 square kilometers of ocean. Now here's a second number. One. That's how many submarine fiber optic cable landings the country has been depending on. Hold those two numbers next to each other, because that gap, an enormous patch of water on paper and a single thread of connectivity underneath the whole economy, is the story of this episode. I'm Zach Martin, this is Ocean Capital on KMKT IR Hub Radio, and today we're looking at what happens when ocean finance stops being a series of experiments and starts becoming a market. More importantly, we're looking at why the boring plumbing underneath decides whether a dollar can actually move.

Zach Martin

If you listened to the last episode, you'll remember where we left things. We looked at the prototype phase. The 2018 Seychelles blue bond, fifteen million dollars, de risked by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility. Gabon's debt conversion. Those were proofs of concept, a first rep in the gym, and we diagnosed Sierra Leone as a country with a wide gap between sovereign paperwork and investable capital. Lots of water, lots of legal rights over that water, and very little of it showing up as an asset that a pension fund or a development bank can put on a balance sheet. I'm going to treat all of that as settled history today and leap into the current wave, roughly 2024 into 2026, when the instruments multiplied and the rulebooks got written.

Zach Martin

Let me set the scale first, because scale is what makes the capital question urgent. The estimate that gets cited is that the ocean economy generates around two and a half trillion dollars a year. That's comparable to the seventh largest economy in the world. Closer to our anchor country, the African Union estimates that Africa's aquatic economy generates around three hundred billion dollars and supports about forty nine million jobs, and the AU projects that reaching four hundred and five billion dollars by 2030. The Sierra Leone research we're drawing on, a paper by Sorie Kalie Bangura and Emmanuel Bongay published in April 2025, repeats that continental figure and describes Sierra Leone's blue economy as a little known source of untapped wealth that could become the country's largest export sector. It has a 506 kilometer coastline and sits in what the paper calls one of the world's richest fishing grounds. Hold onto the word potential in that sentence, because we're going to test it against the data in the last chapter.

Zach Martin

Now the other side of the ledger, the part that should make you lean in. The World Economic Forum estimates that around 175 billion dollars a year of blue finance is needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, by 2030. And of all seventeen goals, Life Below Water has seen the least investment. The framing you'll see in the material I'm working from is that SDG 14 is the single least funded goal, capturing under one percent of philanthropic and development finance. And on the climate side, the LSE's Grantham Research Institute notes that only nine percent of investments in nature based solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation are directed to the marine environment, even though the ocean has real potential to sequester carbon and buffer climate impacts. So you have a huge economy, a huge need, and a thin trickle of money. In coaching terms, that's an athlete with enormous talent and no training program.

Zach Martin

So what's the pivot? Here's the way I'd describe it. For most of history, the ocean was treated as an open access resource. You show up, you take the fish, you dredge the sand, and whoever is faster gets more. That's extraction, and from a financier's point of view it's almost impossible to underwrite, because nobody owns the future cash flows. If any boat can take the fish, nobody has a reason to invest in a cold room, a better vessel, or a hatchery. What global capital is attempting now is a pivot toward managed assets. Low impact aquaculture. Offshore renewables. Green shipping corridors. Blue carbon. In each of those, somebody has a defined right, a measurable output, and a revenue line you can point to. The phrase I keep coming back to is wet acreage. Think of the ocean the way a lender thinks about farmland. The land isn't valuable until there's a title, a road to market, a place to store the harvest, and someone checking that the harvest is real.

Zach Martin

That's the thesis for this hour, and I want to be honest about how I'll handle the evidence. Some things I'll tell you are reported facts from documents. Where I'm interpreting, drawing a line between two facts, I'll say so. And where the material doesn't tell us something, I'll say that too, rather than invent a mechanism that sounds plausible. We'll go in four moves. First, the standardization breakthrough, the rulebook that lets a bond be called blue and mean something. Second, two Sierra Leone bets on the coast, a mangrove carbon project and an island city. Third, the hidden infrastructure, a second submarine cable and the fisheries plumbing. And fourth, a regional platform from the World Bank and a reality check from an econometric study. Small improvements, compounding. Let's start with the rulebook.

Zach Martin

Let me start this chapter with a document, which I realize is not how most people want a podcast chapter to begin. But this document, I'd argue, is one of the most consequential pieces of ocean finance infrastructure of the past few years. It's called Bonds to Finance the Sustainable Blue Economy: A Practitioner's Guide, published in September 2023. The authors come from the Asian Development Bank and the International Finance Corporation, with contributions from the International Capital Market Association, the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative, and the UN Global Compact. That's the full institutional backbone: a development bank, a World Bank Group lender to the private sector, the trade body that sets the rules of the international bond market, a UN finance initiative, and a UN corporate sustainability platform. When that group puts its names on a page, issuers and underwriters pay attention.

Zach Martin

Why does a guide matter? Because a market can't scale on trust alone. The guide itself says it builds on the existing standards that underpin the sustainable bond market, the Green Bond Principles, the Social Bond Principles, the Sustainability Bond Guidelines, and the Sustainability Linked Bond Principles from ICMA. Those voluntary standards have outlined best practice since 2014. What the Practitioner's Guide adds is the thematic layer. It says, if you want to issue a green or sustainability bond whose proceeds go to ocean projects, here's what counts, here's what doesn't, and here's what you'll report afterward. It also points to the other route, sustainability linked bonds with blue key performance indicators, where the money isn't ring fenced for a project but the borrower's cost of capital is tied to hitting an ocean related target. It's voluntary, and the authors are explicit that it's not investment advice. But a voluntary standard that everybody copies becomes a de facto rulebook.

Zach Martin

Here's what counts. The guide lays out eight eligible categories, and I want to read them to you, because the list is a map of where the money is meant to go. One, coastal climate adaptation and resilience. Two, marine ecosystem management and restoration. Three, sustainable marine tourism. Four, sustainable marine value chains, which covers fisheries, aquaculture, and the cold chain supply that moves seafood from boat to buyer. Five, marine renewable energy. Six, marine pollution prevention, so solid waste, wastewater, and circularity. Seven, sustainable ports. Eight, sustainable marine transport. Notice something about that list. A lot of it is infrastructure. Cold chain. Wastewater. Ports. Resilience works. Even the fisheries category is framed as a value chain, not as a quota of fish. The standard is quietly telling you that blue finance is as much about the concrete and the cables and the cold rooms as it is about the whales. Keep that in your pocket, because Sierra Leone's story is exactly that.

Zach Martin

Now the part I think matters even more than the list of what's in: the list of what's out. The framework is built to guard against what people call bluewashing, labeling something blue because it sounds good and the investors are hungry. So it disqualifies non renewable marine extraction. Deep sea mining. Marine aggregate dredging. Offshore oil and gas. It disqualifies vessels that run exclusively on fossil fuels, and that includes unmitigated liquefied natural gas. It disqualifies greenfield port construction that destroys critical habitats. And it excludes fisheries that lack traceability or that use destructive gear. If you're an issuer, that last one is a quiet but powerful requirement. Traceability means someone has to be able to show where the fish came from. Which, as you'll see in a few minutes, means somebody has to build the monitoring system that produces that evidence. A rule about labels turns into a demand for infrastructure.

Zach Martin

The standard would be a nice piece of paper if nobody used it, so let's look at who's issuing. The material I'm working from highlights four examples. The Export Import Bank of Korea, KEXIM, issued a one billion dollar maritime blue bond. That's one billion, not fifteen million, so the scale jump from the Seychelles pilot is more than sixty fold. In the Philippines, BDO Unibank issued a hundred million dollar marine pollution bond. In Brazil, BRK Ambiental issued a 365 million dollar coastal sanitation bond. And then the one I find most instructive: Thai Union, the seafood company, issued a 152 million dollar sustainability linked bond with coupon step ups tied directly to electronic surveillance and human observer coverage across its tuna fleets. The LSE explainer mentions the same family of ideas more broadly: Seychelles issuing a blue transition bond, Fiji's green and blue bond, Danish energy company Ørsted as a corporate issuer, and seafood multinationals using sustainability linked loans and bonds.

Zach Martin

Let me slow down on Thai Union, because it shows the mechanism better than any abstract explanation. A sustainability linked bond works like a deal with a built in penalty. The company gets to borrow, but it commits to a target, and if it misses, the coupon, the interest it pays, steps up. Here the target is about surveillance of tuna fleets, electronic monitoring and human observers aboard the boats. So the company's financing cost is now linked to how much of its fishing is actually being watched. Think about what that does. The investor doesn't have to trust a sustainability brochure. There's a number, observers and electronic coverage, and the price of the money moves with it. That's the best analogy I have for what a good standard does. It's like a training log. Not a promise to get fit, but a record you can check, and consequences attached to the record.

Zach Martin

Before we go further, here's a bit of interpretation, flagged as such. Look at the four issuers I just named. A Korean state export bank, a Philippine commercial bank, a Brazilian sanitation company, a Thai seafood processor. Each of them already had a balance sheet, a credit rating, a regulator, a legal system where a bondholder can enforce a claim. The standards solved the labeling problem for them. They didn't need to solve the plumbing problem, because the plumbing already existed. That's the hard truth for frontier ocean states. A guide can tell you what a credible blue bond looks like, but it can't deliver the ports, the monitoring systems, or the reporting data that make a bond credible. In the material I'm working from, I don't see a Sierra Leone blue bond. What I see are the building blocks that any such instrument would eventually have to stand on. And that's the right way to read the next two chapters: as the early work of building the thing that a standard can later certify.

Zach Martin

One more piece of context from the LSE explainer, because it helps us see how many tools there are beyond bonds. Loans with blue components are easier for smaller companies to access, and they can carry performance linked terms, like a target on cutting plastic waste at a hotel. Blue carbon credits are offsets generated by carbon stored in marine ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrass, often used to fund conservation. There are equity investments in marine focused businesses. There's insurance, including underwriting for coastal protection that uses mangroves. And there are blended finance programs like Blue Halo, launched in 2022 at the G20 meetings in Indonesia, which combine public and philanthropic capital with private investment. So the 2024 to 2026 wave isn't one product. It's a menu: sovereign bonds, corporate sustainability linked bonds, carbon equity, public private partnerships. And the menu only works when the kitchen behind it is built. Let's go to the kitchen, starting on the Sherbro coast.

Zach Martin

On July 2, 2025, at the Africa Debate in London, the UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, announced an investment. The investor was FSD Africa Investments, FSDAi, which the release describes as a UK backed specialist development finance investor. The amount: 2.5 million dollars. The recipient: West Africa Blue, a developer of blue carbon projects based in Freetown, which the release says has worked in the region for over a decade. The asset: a blue carbon project in Sierra Leone's Sherbro River Estuary. 2.5 million dollars is a rounding error in the world of one billion dollar maritime bonds. So why am I spending a chapter on it? Because it's a clean window into how an ecosystem becomes an asset.

Zach Martin

Start with the physical thing. The project will contribute to the conservation and restoration of approximately 94,000 hectares of mangrove ecosystems across 11 chiefdoms. The release calls mangroves powerful carbon sinks that also build coastal resilience. Now, how does a stand of trees in mud become something a financier can underwrite? Through carbon credits. The LSE explainer describes blue carbon credits as offsets generated from carbon sequestered in marine ecosystems like mangroves, often used to fund conservation. So the theory is that protecting and restoring mangroves keeps carbon in the ecosystem, that carbon can be measured and turned into credits, and those credits can be sold, generating revenue. The mangrove becomes a revenue line, not just a scenic backdrop. And the project has company: West Africa Blue says it has a second project in Guinea and a pipeline of earlier stage projects.

Zach Martin

But the release is refreshingly candid about why this doesn't happen automatically. I'll quote the logic directly. It says that despite their promise, blue carbon projects struggle to raise private sector investment due to their complexity, extended timelines to scale, and high execution risks. Let me translate those three. Complexity: you're dealing with ecosystems, communities, governments, measurement science, and carbon markets all at once. Extended timelines: trees and mud don't produce a revenue stream in the first year. High execution risk: if the community isn't on board or the measurement isn't credible, the whole thing unravels. A commercial lender looking at that will say, come back when you've proved it. And that's exactly the gap FSDAi is targeting. It says its early stage investment will help de risk the project and demonstrate the feasibility of structuring financing facilities linked to carbon revenue. The stated aim is to help developers transition from a dependence on scarce philanthropic and concessional funding toward a model that attracts commercial investment.

Zach Martin

I want to give that idea a plain label, and it's an interpretation of the release, not a quote. This is catalytic equity. Small money, early in the life of a project, whose job is not to finish the project but to produce evidence. The evidence is that carbon revenues can come in predictably enough that a bigger lender can write a loan against them. Think of the first hundred dollars you ever save in a disciplined way. It isn't about the hundred dollars. It's about proving to yourself that the habit works, so that the next thousand follows. FSDAi's chief investment officer, Anne Marie Chidzero, said this is the organization's first direct foray into nature based solutions and that it underscores a commitment to demonstrate the financial proposition to financing nature and creating economic opportunities for communities. So the first check is also a demonstration project for FSDAi itself.

Zach Martin

Now the piece I think is the real hidden infrastructure of this deal, and it isn't concrete or fiber. It's a contract. A core component of the project is a benefit sharing mechanism, developed in consultation with communities and the government. West Africa Blue's senior partner, Elizabeth Littlefield, said they aim to set a high benchmark for quality, transparency and fairness, including sharing their Benefit Sharing Agreement and other tools, to catalyze the nature based solution market in Africa. And the company describes its projects as living labs, publishing its lessons, models, and its full Benefit Sharing Agreement open source. Why does a revenue sharing agreement matter to an investor? Here's my reading. Carbon revenue comes from a resource that coastal communities live on and a state ultimately has jurisdiction over. If the split between communities, the project operator, and the central government isn't clear and credible, the cash flow is politically fragile. Publishing the agreement is a way of turning a social license into something a risk officer can read. That's my interpretation, but it's consistent with the stated goal of an equitable and transparent mechanism.

Zach Martin

Let's move east, or really, down the same coast, to the other Sherbro story, and let me be careful here because this is a very different animal. In June 2025, the Parliament of Sierra Leone ratified an agreement with Sherbro Alliance Partners, SAP, a public private partnership to transform Sherbro Island into a modern city. In the brief for this episode, SAP is described as co founded by British actor and entrepreneur Idris Elba and Siaka Stevens. On June 26, 2025, according to a State House release, Elba and his SAP team paid a courtesy call on President Julius Maada Bio at the Presidential Lodge in Freetown to thank the government and parliament for the ratification. Elba said the milestone represents years of perseverance and that they were excited to move into the next phase. And he pointed to the president's own roots in the Bonthe District, saying Sherbro Island holds a special place in his heart.

Zach Martin

President Bio's response is worth quoting, because it signals how the state views the project. He said, and I'll quote: This project is personal for me, not just because I come from Bonthe, but because I believe in its potential to unlock major investment and tourism opportunities for Sierra Leone. He added that it's the collective responsibility to position Sierra Leone as a destination where investment can thrive, and that this project is just the beginning. The State House release describes it as a flagship public private partnership designed to transform Sherbro Island into a modern city that drives economic growth, creates jobs, and positions Sierra Leone as a regional hub for tourism and investment. The project's own promotional material describes a city inspired by Afro dynamism and eco principles, blending Sierra Leonean culture and tradition while safeguarding the natural environment. And the strategic concept in my brief frames it as an eco city with renewable microgrids, high capacity digital infrastructure, and sustainable tourism and innovation hubs.

Zach Martin

Here's the capital markets lens, and I'll mark it as interpretation. A country with a long coastline has two broad ways to turn geography into income. One is raw extraction: sell the minerals, sell the fishing licenses, let others dredge. The other is master planning: take a defined piece of shoreline, put a legal structure around it, a long term partnership, and monetize the place itself through tourism, services, and real estate. The Sherbro Island project is the second model. And notice what ratification does. It's the legal act that turns an announcement into something a lender can read. A memorandum of understanding is a handshake. A ratified agreement is a document with parliamentary weight behind it. Same as the difference between saying you'll start training and putting a recurring session on the calendar with a coach who expects you to show up.

Zach Martin

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I only told the glossy half. The sources I have describe the ambition and the political support. They don't give me financing terms, construction schedules, or an environmental assessment, so I won't pretend they do. What I can do is tell you which questions the standards from chapter two would ask. Is any of the shoreline development creating greenfield port or marine infrastructure that damages critical habitat? Under the Practitioner's Guide, that kind of construction is excluded from the blue bond label. Is the renewable microgrid actually delivering renewable power? Is the digital infrastructure real, and does it have a path to the sea floor, which brings us to our next chapter? And, because both projects carry the Sherbro name, how do mangrove conservation and island development coexist? I'm not claiming a conflict. I don't see evidence of one in the material. I'm saying that's exactly the kind of coordination question that the legal zoning and master planning have to answer before a rated, labeled instrument could ever sit on top. The island city needs the same boring things the fishing sector needs. And the first of those is a connection to the world.

Zach Martin

Let's talk about the cable, because it's the clearest example of hidden infrastructure in this entire story. In 2013, the Africa Coast to Europe cable, ACE, landed in Freetown under the World Bank's West Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program, WARCIP. Sierra Leone has depended on that single submarine fiber optic landing since. Now two things about that fact. First, it's single. A document from Sierra Leone's Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation, with World Bank comments, puts it plainly: the reliance of the country on a single submarine cable poses significant risks to its national connectivity. Second, it's aging. ACE is approaching the end of its fifteen year design life. A single, aging thread carrying the digital weight of a country. The Bangura and Bongay paper cites a United Nations figure that submarine cables can carry ninety percent of the electronic traffic we rely on. So the thing underneath the screens is not a satellite. It's a cable on the sea floor.

Zach Martin

Then in March 2024, we got a live demonstration of what single point failure means. Major undersea fiber cuts off West Africa severed ACE along with two other trunk cables. The result, as laid out in the brief for this episode, was catastrophic telecommunications and payment processing blackouts across Sierra Leone and sixteen other African nations. Think about what a payment processing blackout means. A trader can't confirm a mobile money transfer. A shop can't take a card. A bank can't settle. The ocean economy isn't just boats and fish and sand. It's also the invisible digital layer that lets someone get paid for the fish. And this is where the capital flows story connects directly. Every instrument we talked about, the bonds, the carbon credits, the reporting on outputs, depends on data and payments moving reliably. A country that can go dark when one cable is cut has a risk premium baked into everything it tries to finance.

Zach Martin

So what's the response? It's called the second cable initiative, and it's very much a 2025 to 2026 story. It's supported by the World Bank's Sierra Leone Digital Transformation Project, a fifty million dollar grant from the International Development Association. The Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation has been working on a national feasibility study for a second submarine cable landing, and the terms of reference document for that study is part of what I'm drawing from. In July 2025, the ministry visited Guinea for a bilateral mission. The structure being explored is an operator consortium: Orange, Africell, QCell, Metro, Leonecom, and Zoodlabs. And one of the options being evaluated is a dedicated branch off Meta's 2Africa system. I want to stress the word evaluated. This is feasibility work, not a finished landing. I don't have a construction date or a final route to give you, and I won't make one up.

Zach Martin

Why would competing telecom operators sit in one consortium? Here's my interpretation. A submarine landing is expensive and indivisible. Nobody wants to build a cable alone and then watch a competitor ride it for free, but nobody wants to be stuck on one cable either. A consortium spreads the cost and the benefit. The role of the World Bank grant, in that reading, is to pay for the study and the structuring, the least glamorous but most necessary phase, so that a commercial deal can be assembled around it. Notice that's the same pattern we saw with the mangroves: concessional or public money doing the early de risking work, so private capital can follow. And the brief's final line on this is the one to underline. Without redundant submarine bandwidth, fintech, automated port clearance, and digital trade corridors cannot function. Redundancy isn't a luxury. It's the entry ticket.

Zach Martin

Now let's go down to the waterline, to the fishing sector, where the hidden infrastructure is less about fiber and more about rules and refrigeration. In 2025 the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources published a strategy, developed with support from the World Bank and the Government of Iceland, called the Feed Salone Strategy for the Fisheries and Marine Resources Sectors. It lays out a ten year vision with a 2035 horizon: Sierra Leone as a regional leader in sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. The numbers in its executive summary tell you why this matters economically. Fisheries provide livelihoods to about fourteen percent of the population. They provide more than half of Sierra Leone's animal protein. People eat about 25 kilograms of fish per person per year, compared with a regional average of 11.2. The fisheries are thought to yield about 250,000 metric tons a year, and about 45 percent of total annual production is sold in local markets. And the strategy admits there are clear indications that some resources are declining due to climate change and environmental degradation.

Zach Martin

The strategy was shaped through consultations in Goderich, Tombo, Shenge, Gbondapi, Konakridee, and Freetown, between March 24 and April 8, 2025, with officials, artisanal fishers, community leaders, aquaculture specialists, and civil society. And what came out, as summarized in the brief, is a confirmed willingness among coastal communities to move away from unrestricted open access, which produces the tragedy of the commons and conflicts over gear, toward restricted access regimes, mandatory boat registration, and Territorial Use Rights to Fisheries, known as TURFs. In plain language, a TURF is a defined stretch of water where a community has the right to fish and an incentive to look after what's there. This is the financial pivot we described in chapter one, written into a national strategy. You can't invest in what you don't have the right to. The property right comes first, and the capital follows.

Zach Martin

The overall price tag is modest by global standards. The strategy budgets required sector investments between 27.88 million dollars and 33.73 million dollars. That's less than a rounding error next to KEXIM's billion dollar bond. And the interesting part is the line items, because they read like a tour of plumbing. Under Strategic Objective 2, managing and enforcing the sector, there's a hundred thousand dollars to tighten industrial vessel monitoring systems, VMS, and automatic identification systems, AIS, under the Joint Maritime Committee. There's twenty thousand dollars to purge blacklisted illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing vessels from the Sierra Leone ship registry. And there's between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand dollars to integrate Community Management Associations into legally admissible surveillance. That last phrase matters. Legally admissible. It means a fisher's observation of an illegal trawler has to be recorded in a form a court or a regulator will accept. Evidence is infrastructure.

Zach Martin

Now go back to the Thai Union bond. Its coupon steps up based on electronic surveillance and human observer coverage. Notice the family resemblance. Here's my interpretation, labeled as such: the systems this Sierra Leone strategy is funding, vessel monitoring, a clean ship registry, community surveillance that holds up legally, are the same kind of data streams that make traceability and surveillance targets measurable. If you ever wanted a Sierra Leone fisheries instrument with a performance target, you'd need those systems to exist first. Not because any document says Sierra Leone is planning that, it doesn't, but because the guide's exclusion of fisheries without traceability tells us what an investor would demand. A hundred thousand dollars of monitoring upgrades looks small, and yet it might be the line item with the highest leverage in the whole budget.

Zach Martin

Then there's Strategic Objective 3, unlocking the potential to increase national wealth. Five million dollars targeted at landing site cold storage and processing hubs. Two million for aquaculture infrastructure. Five to ten million for fleet innovation grants. Let's spend a moment on the cold chain, because it's the least sexy item and arguably the most important. When artisanally landed fish comes ashore with no cold storage, it spoils quickly. The argument in the brief is that this depresses margins, because the fisher has to sell fast at whatever price is offered, and that it pushes fishers into debt cycles. I'd put it this way: refrigeration is the difference between selling your harvest today and selling it when the price is right. It's the same logic as an emergency fund. A buffer gives you the freedom to negotiate rather than react. And the Practitioner's Guide's fourth category, sustainable marine value chains including the cold chain, shows that the standards already recognize this. Cold rooms are explicitly on the list of things a blue bond can finance. The money exists in principle. The assets that could receive it, at scale in Sierra Leone, are still being planned.

Zach Martin

So far we've seen a standards layer, two coastal bets, and some very practical plumbing. The question that remains is how all of this scales beyond one country, and for that I want to turn to a regional platform that was approved in March 2026. The World Bank Group approved 240 million dollars for the first phase of the West Africa Coastal Areas Blue Economy and Resilience Program, called WACA Plus. The headline on the press release says it will protect 530,000 people and catalyze 13,000 blue economy jobs. Let's look at how that 240 million is built, because the composition is the lesson. 207 million dollars comes from the International Development Association, the World Bank's concessional window for the poorest countries. Five million comes from PROBLUE, the World Bank's trust fund for the blue economy. And 28 million dollars is mobilized private capital. Add those up and you get 240. Roughly eighty six percent public concessional money, a sliver of philanthropic style trust fund capital, and about twelve percent private. That's my arithmetic, not the release's phrasing.

Zach Martin

Is twelve percent private a disappointment? I'd read it differently. This is what blended finance looks like at the early stage of a market. The public money does the work that no private actor can price yet: shoreline stabilization, mangrove restoration, the studies, the institutions. The program targets about three thousand hectares of mangrove restoration in this phase. And then it uses specific tools to pull private money in. One is the Partial Portfolio Credit Guarantee. A guarantee like that covers part of a bank's losses on a basket of loans, which makes the bank more willing to lend to a sector it's nervous about. The example in the brief is a guarantee unlocking twenty million dollars in commercial lending for fish processors in Mauritania. The other tool is MSME matching grants, where small and medium businesses get a grant that matches their own investment. So the guarantee moves the bank, and the grant moves the small firm. Together they target the exact gap we saw in chapter four, the cold chain and processing capacity that sits between a boat and a buyer.

Zach Martin

What I find most interesting is the design philosophy. WACA Plus is described as a modular platform designed to expand across West Africa, with an ambition of reaching 1.3 million hectares of seascape and 50,000 jobs over time. Modular means a country can plug in without the whole thing being redesigned. It's the opposite of a one off pilot. If the first two chapters were about prototypes and standards, this is about repeatable machinery. Same logic as a training plan: the point isn't one great workout, it's a template you can repeat across every week and every country. As for where Sierra Leone sits in that platform, I'll be careful. The sources I have describe the program's regional design and its examples, and I don't have a Sierra Leone allocation to quote you. So I'll treat it as the regional context, not as a Sierra Leone line item.

Zach Martin

Now for the reality check, because I promised you one. All of this assumes that the blue economy actually moves the needle on national output, and that a country with a rich ocean can convert it into growth. Let's look at a piece of evidence. Bangura and Bongay's paper, published in April 2025 in the GRS Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Studies, analyzes Sierra Leone from 1990 to 2023, using GDP as the dependent variable and looking at four factors: ocean trade, fisheries, aquaculture, and agriculture as a control. They use a Granger causality test and, according to the brief, Johansen cointegration. A quick plain English on those. Granger causality asks whether past values of one series help predict another. It's about predictive timing, which is not the same as proof of true cause and effect. Cointegration asks whether series that wander over time tend to move together in a stable long run relationship. And the paper's finding, per the brief, is that cointegration confirms three long run equilibrium relationships between the blue sectors and national growth. Its abstract concludes that blue economy factors significantly contribute to Sierra Leone's economic progress.

Zach Martin

That sounds encouraging, and it is. But here's the part of the paper I think matters more for capital allocators. Using UNCTAD data for 2018, the authors show that Sierra Leone's ocean product exports were less than half a billion dollars, in a comparison of selected ECOWAS countries. Nigeria stood out, exporting more than one and a half billion dollars of ocean products. The paper's own question is, why has Sierra Leone's ocean commerce volume lagged behind others in the ECOWAS sub region? The authors point to the Government's many sector policies and acts, and they also describe structural bottlenecks. As summarized in the brief: a lack of processing infrastructure, cold chain gaps, weak surveillance, and institutional fragmentation. Read that list again and compare it to what we just covered. Processing, cold chain, surveillance, institutions. Those are almost exactly the line items in the Feed Salone fisheries strategy. The academic diagnosis and the government's budget are pointing at the same set of missing pieces.

Zach Martin

I want to be fair about the limits of that paper. It's one study, it uses national aggregate data, and the authors themselves note that studies from other countries like Nigeria offered limited direct relevance to the Sierra Leone context. A statistical relationship across 34 years doesn't tell you which specific project will pay back. What it does tell you, and this is my interpretation, is that the ocean is already tied to the national economy in a durable way, and that the gap isn't a lack of fish or coastline. It's conversion. The authors' recommendations include prioritizing investment in ocean trade, fisheries, and aquaculture, fostering international partnerships, and promoting sustainable practices. In other words, the research arrives at the same place as the standards and the programs: the ocean is not short of potential, it's short of infrastructure that turns potential into cash flow.

Zach Martin

So let's bring it home. We started with two numbers: 215,611 square kilometers of water and one cable. Here's how I'd summarize what 2024 to 2026 looks like. The instruments multiplied. We have a Practitioner's Guide with eight eligible categories and firm exclusions, and issuers from Korea to Brazil to the Philippines to Thailand using it, with deal sizes jumping from fifteen million to a billion. We have blue carbon equity, like FSDAi's 2.5 million dollars into 94,000 hectares of mangroves across 11 chiefdoms, with an open source Benefit Sharing Agreement that tries to make the revenue split legible. We have a ratified public private partnership for an island city. We have a World Bank program blending 207 million of concessional money with five million of trust fund money and 28 million of private capital. All of that is the visible layer. And underneath it sits the layer that decides whether any of it compounds: a second cable, monitoring systems that hold up in court, a clean ship registry, landing site cold rooms, zoning that works, reporting data that investors can trust.

Zach Martin

What should you take from this, whether you're an investor, a policy person, or just someone curious about where money goes? Three things. First, watch the plumbing, not just the press release. The headline amounts are announcements. The hundred thousand dollar monitoring line and the five million dollar cold storage line are the things that make the headlines bankable. Second, notice the pattern of sequencing. In every case, public or concessional money went first, whether that's the World Bank grant for the cable study, FSDAi's early equity, or the IDA core of WACA Plus, and the private capital is being invited in behind it. Sequencing is a discipline, the same as in training: you don't skip the base phase. Third, keep a clear head about what's proven and what's still a plan. The cable is under feasibility study. The fisheries strategy is a roadmap with budgets, not a completed program. The island city has a ratified agreement and a lot of ambition. Be encouraged, but check the evidence.

Zach Martin

I'll leave you with one final thought, and it's the same one I'd give anybody trying to build something that lasts. Growth doesn't come from the big announcement. It comes from small, boring improvements that compound. A second cable. A tightened vessel monitoring system. A cold room at a landing site. A benefit sharing agreement written down and published. Each one on its own looks too small to matter next to a trillion dollar ocean economy. But a country with a 506 kilometer coastline doesn't need a miracle. It needs reps. If you stay with this series, that's what we'll keep tracking: not the splashy numbers, but the infrastructure underneath them that turns wet acreage into assets. This has been Ocean Capital on KMKT IR Hub Radio. I'm Zach Martin. Keep building the base.