Wet Acreage and the Blue Economy Funding Gap

Zach Martin

In March 2024, several undersea cables off the coast of West Africa were cut. In Sierra Leone, the damage reached the Africa Coast to Europe cable, known as ACE, and that mattered more than it would almost anywhere else, because ACE was the country's single point of international connectivity. When it was severed, Sierra Leone suffered severe internet and banking blackouts. Think about what that means. One strand of glass fiber, lying on the seabed, stood between a whole country and the rest of the digital world. Welcome to Ocean Capital, on KMKT IR Hub Radio. I'm Zach Martin, and today we're going to treat the ocean the way a good investor treats any asset. We're going to read the balance sheet, and then we're going to go looking for the plumbing.

Zach Martin

Let me set up where we are. This is a late 2026 update, and it builds on an earlier episode, Blue Finance: Turning Ocean Potential into Investable Assets. In that one we worked through the 2023 ICMA and IFC Practitioner's Guide, the rulebook for blue bonds and blue loans, and I introduced an idea I've been calling wet acreage. The point was that ocean rights, things like fishing access, port concessions, coastal licenses and carbon storage in mangroves, are starting to behave like land. They can be surveyed, defined, leased, and financed against. Well, if wet acreage is the land, today's question is who pays to build on it. Because the people who used to pay, the donors, are heading for the exits. And the second question is what has to exist underneath, the cables, the ports, the sensors, the cold rooms, for any of this land to produce income.

Zach Martin

Here's how we'll move. First, the scale and the funding gap. Then the aid contraction, which is the biggest macro story in this space right now, and what it does to the way ocean projects get built. Then we go to Sierra Leone and look at the Blue Economy Strategic Framework and National Action Plan launched in November 2024, and ask what it's worth on paper versus in the water. After that, the hidden infrastructure, including the second submarine cable effort. And finally a governance argument that I think every ocean investor should sit with, about whether the rules of blue finance are helping coastal countries build productive economies, or just helping the rest of us feel good about conserving their waters.

Zach Martin

Start with scale, because the numbers are big. The UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative describes the ocean linked sectors, shipping, seafood, marine renewable energy, port construction, coastal tourism and coastal infrastructure, as having an estimated annual economic value of 2.5 trillion US dollars. That's equivalent to the world's seventh largest economy. Now zoom in on Africa. The African Union estimates that the continent's aquatic and ocean based economy generated somewhere between 296 and 300 billion dollars in output in 2018 and 2019, and supported about 49 million jobs. And the AU projects that, if current trajectories are maintained, that climbs to roughly 405 billion dollars and 57 million jobs by 2030, and 576 billion dollars and 78 million jobs by 2063. Keep that qualifier in mind. These are projections, conditional on trajectories holding, and the baseline is from before the pandemic years and the aid shock we're about to discuss.

Zach Martin

The UNDP's State of the Africa Blue Economy report from July 2026 adds some geography to that. Thirty eight of the continent's fifty four states are coastal. More than 90 percent of Africa's imports and exports travel by water. Fish from the continent's fresh and marine waters is fundamental to the food security and nutrition of more than 200 million people, and about 12 million Africans earn their living directly from these resources. So when we say the ocean economy matters, we're not talking about a niche. For a lot of African economies, the ocean is the trade route, the grocery store, and the employer, all at once.

Zach Martin

Now here's the uncomfortable part. Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, is the least funded of all the Sustainable Development Goals. It captures under 1 percent of philanthropic and development finance, set against an estimated annual funding gap of 174 to 175 billion dollars. I like to use a restaurant analogy for this. Imagine the biggest dining room in town, packed every night, feeding half the neighborhood, and the kitchen budget is a rounding error. Eventually the stoves fail, the staff leave, and somebody says the restaurant was never viable. The problem was never the dining room. It was that nobody funded the kitchen. Scale of opportunity and scale of capital are two different things, and the ocean economy right now is a masterclass in the gap between them.

Zach Martin

The UNDP report puts the situation in a phrase I keep coming back to. It characterizes the state of the African blue economy as promising but undercapitalized, fragmented and unevenly implemented. And it makes two observations that I'd underline. First, over 80 percent of African countries have embedded the blue economy into national development plans or climate strategies. Second, and I'm quoting here, political support and policy adoption have surpassed delivery. In other words, the paperwork is ahead of the pipework. The report also notes that a large portion of the continent's blue economy progress has so far been initiated and financed by external partners, which it says raises questions about ownership, long term autonomy and sustainability. Hold on to that last point. It becomes the whole story once the external partners start writing smaller checks.

Zach Martin

Why Sierra Leone? Because it's a country you can hold in your head all at once. It has a coastline of somewhere between 402 and 506 kilometers, depending on how you measure it. About 20 percent of its people live in coastal zones. About 25 percent depend on fishing for their livelihoods. Fish accounts for over 90 percent of the animal protein people eat nationwide. It has a single international data cable, a port system at Freetown and Pepel that is bound to inland roads and customs processes, and a brand new national strategy for the blue economy. Every layer of the ocean balance sheet is there, and they're visibly connected to one another. When something fails in one layer, you can watch it fail in the next. That's why I'll keep coming back to it throughout this episode.

Zach Martin

One more housekeeping note, because I want to be honest about what kind of claims I'm making. When I give you a number, I'll tell you where it comes from and whether it's a measurement, an estimate, or a target. When I'm offering my own interpretation, I'll say so. The ocean finance world has a habit of blurring those three categories together, and an investor who can't tell a realized cash flow from an aspirational projection is going to have a rough decade. So let's keep them separate.

Zach Martin

And let's go back to the cable for a moment, because it teaches the first lesson. This is my interpretation, not a finding from any report. Capital doesn't float. It moves through physical things. A blue bond needs verified data about what it funds. A fishery that wants to sell to premium export markets needs records that can be audited. A port that wants to earn more needs customs paperwork that moves at the speed of the ships. All of that rides on networks, and in Sierra Leone's case, in March 2024, the network was one cable wide. So when we talk about ocean capital flows, I want you to hold two pictures at once. One is the macro picture, billions of dollars sloshing between donors, banks and governments. The other is the micro picture, a strand of fiber on a seabed and a canoe on a beach. The macro picture is changing fast, and that's where we go next.

Zach Martin

Let's talk about the money that has been the quiet engine of ocean development for decades, which is aid. According to preliminary OECD data published in the middle of 2026, global net official development assistance fell by 23.3 percent in 2025 compared with 2024. That is the largest single year contraction on record, and it's the second consecutive year of decline. Let that sink in for a second. Not a slowdown, not a flattening. The biggest drop since records began, following a drop the year before.

Zach Martin

And the OECD projections don't promise a rebound. They show net ODA from the members of the Development Assistance Committee falling another 6.9 percent in 2026, and landing nearly 10 percent below 2025 levels by 2028. The brief I'm working from attributes the sharpest cuts to the five largest providers, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and France. Those five carry a lot of the system. When they trim, everyone downstream feels it. My reading, and this is interpretation, is that we've moved from a cyclical dip to a structural retreat. If you're a coastal government or a project developer in 2026, planning on the assumption that grants will recover to their old levels is like planning your retirement around winning a lottery you already know has fewer tickets.

Zach Martin

To understand why that matters for the ocean specifically, we need to understand what aid actually does in this sector, and the OECD has a very clear account of it. A recent OECD report on financing Southeast Asia's blue economy is a good lens, even though it's about a different region, because it describes the mechanics. First, the numbers that put aid in perspective. In Southeast Asia, official development finance accounted for roughly 6 to 11 percent of total external inflows plus tax revenues between 2010 and 2023, and just under 10 percent in 2023. That's small. But the OECD argues the small share masks its importance, and it gives two reasons. Lower income countries rely on it far more heavily. In Timor Leste, ODA was 45 percent of the financing mix over 2022 and 2023. In Myanmar, 24 percent. In Lao PDR, 21. In Cambodia, 16. And second, because aid is grant based and highly concessional, the OECD calls it an irreplaceable catalytic instrument. It doesn't just fill a gap. It strengthens the conditions that let other capital show up.

Zach Martin

Let me translate catalytic into plain language, because it's the key word in this chapter. Think of aid as the person who clears the brush and lays the foundation slab so that a builder will even consider the lot. The OECD says concessional resources and ODA often absorb early stage and policy risks, cover project preparation and technical assistance costs, and provide guarantees that make blue economy investments acceptable to domestic and international investors. And here's a line I think is important for anyone who's been excited about blue bonds, debt for nature swaps, blue carbon markets and parametric insurance. The OECD notes that those instruments have typically relied on development partners for their design, piloting and scaling, whether through credit enhancements or capacity building. So the glamorous financial products of the blue economy were, to a significant degree, built on a grant funded scaffold. Now the scaffold is being taken down while the building is half finished.

Zach Martin

The OECD also lists why ocean projects are hard to finance without that scaffold, and the list is concrete. High development costs for things like offshore renewables mean multi year grant support is often needed to reach investment readiness, yet grant financing is limited and short term. For small scale fisheries, the ticket sizes are so small that due diligence costs typically exceed the size of the deal, which scares investors away. Nature based solutions, like mangrove restoration for coastal protection, frequently lack clear revenue profiles because there isn't enough performance data. Ocean focused small and medium businesses often fail standard creditworthiness checks. And the time horizons for coastal protection or large scale ecosystem restoration to pay back are longer than most investors want to wait. Add limited fiscal space and high public debt in developing countries, and you can see the cycle the OECD describes. Limited government money means less public co financing to reduce risk. Weak regulation increases uncertainty. Uncertainty deters private money. And the cycle reinforces itself.

Zach Martin

Now, there's a second finding in the OECD material that I find even more sobering, because it says that even when aid is available, the ocean sector has trouble using it. OECD tracking shows that 38 percent of ocean related ODA commitments between 2010 and 2023 remained undisbursed. For ODA in general, the figure is 14 percent. So the ocean sector's gap between promise and delivery is nearly three times worse than the average. A commitment is a press release. A disbursement is a bridge getting built. Thirty eight percent of the ocean press releases never turned into money moving.

Zach Martin

Why would that be? The brief points to concentration. Over 60 percent of ocean related development assistance was concentrated in capital intensive transport and port projects. When most of your money sits in a small number of very large projects, a single delay, a single procurement dispute, a single contractor problem, swings the annual numbers wildly. That produces extreme year over year volatility. And it leaves the smaller, less glamorous functions chronically underfunded. The brief names fisheries traceability, data systems, and marine renewable energy. I'd add an interpretation here. Those are exactly the functions that make an ocean asset bankable. Traceability is what lets a fish sell for a premium. Data systems are what let an investor verify a claim. So the sector has been pouring concrete at the port while starving the information layer that would let private money feel safe nearby.

Zach Martin

So what happens when the grant window narrows? The brief says this structural retreat makes reliance on traditional donor grants untenable, and pushes coastal states toward blended finance, sovereign blue bonds, and domestic revenue mobilization. Let me walk through each of those, because they're quite different animals. Blended finance means using a small slice of concessional or public money to reduce risk so private capital will come in alongside. The OECD notes that in 2023, various leveraging mechanisms mobilized nearly 70 billion dollars in private finance globally. That's real, and it's a reason to be hopeful. But notice the irony. Blended finance needs the concessional slice to exist. If aid shrinks by a quarter in a year, the slice that does the de risking shrinks too, unless it's deployed more cleverly.

Zach Martin

Sovereign blue bonds are the second path, and the track record in Africa is worth knowing. According to a January 2026 essay by Xingcan Zhou published by the Inclusive Society Institute in Cape Town, Seychelles issued the world's first blue bond in 2018, with transaction costs fully sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. That detail matters. The first one needed a philanthropic sponsor to cover costs. Then in January 2023, according to the same essay, Cabo Verde launched its first blue bond on the Blu X sustainable finance platform, described as the first privately issued bond without a public guarantee, fully supported by market demand. Now that is a genuinely different thing. It's the move from sponsored pilot to something the market priced on its own. I'd treat it as one data point rather than a trend, but it's the direction of travel this aid contraction is pushing everyone toward.

Zach Martin

The third path, debt for nature swaps, has also seen action. The same essay says that in August 2023, Gabon completed a 500 million dollar debt for nature transaction, earmarking 163 million dollars for marine conservation, which it describes as the largest debt restructuring deal signed by an African country. Notice the structure. Partial debt relief in exchange for ecological commitments, typically backed by guarantees from multilateral development banks. So even the so called commercial innovations lean on public balance sheets in the background. That isn't a criticism. It's a reminder that blue finance in 2026 is a spectrum from fully grant funded to fully commercial, and the center of gravity is shifting along that spectrum without anyone having cleared the path ahead of it.

Zach Martin

The fourth path is the least exciting and probably the most important, which is domestic revenue mobilization. A government that collects fees, licenses and taxes from its own ocean economy can fund its own surveillance, its own data systems, its own inspectors. That's what makes it independent of donor moods. And it connects directly to the UNDP's concern about ownership. If a large portion of progress has been initiated and financed by external partners, then the most durable form of ocean finance is a coastal state that earns enough from its own waters to run them. That is the real prize hiding behind all the instrument names. Bonds and swaps and blended structures are bridges. The destination is a country that can pay its own way.

Zach Martin

There is one more macro development I want to put on the table before we leave this chapter, because it changes the legal ground under the whole sector. The UN High Seas Treaty on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, the BBNJ agreement, formally entered into force on January 17, 2026. It requires environmental impact assessments for offshore exploitation and establishes benefit sharing mechanisms for marine genetic resources. And it reinforces the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's thirty by thirty target, which is protecting 30 percent of coastal and marine areas by 2030. For investors, I read that as the rulebook getting stricter just as the grant scaffold gets thinner. More compliance, less subsidy. That combination rewards organized, data rich, well governed projects, and punishes everyone else. Which brings us to a country that has just written its rulebook, and is now trying to find out what it costs to follow it.

Zach Martin

On November 5, 2024, Sierra Leone's Ministry of Planning and Economic Development formally launched its Blue Economy Strategic Framework and National Action Plan. The launch was led by the planning minister, Kenyeh Ballay, together with the Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources, Princess Dugba. It was developed with technical support from the UNDP, and it's aligned with two other documents. One is the country's Medium Term National Development Plan for 2024 to 2030. The other is the African Union's Africa Continental Blue Economy Programme for 2025 to 2029. So this isn't a freestanding wish list. It's designed to slot into the national budget logic and the continental one. Let's look at what's actually inside it, and I'll start with the asset base, because an investor reads the asset base first.

Zach Martin

Sierra Leone's Exclusive Economic Zone covers about 157,000 square kilometers, and up to 215,611 square kilometers under extended maritime parameters. It has a continental shelf of about 30,000 square kilometers. The Ministry of Fisheries estimates the standing value of fish stocks at over 500 million dollars, across more than 200 identified commercial species, including croakers, pink and tiger shrimp, mackerel, sardines, tuna and bivalves. And the human side is larger than the financial side. Direct employment in artisanal fisheries exceeds 200,000 people, spread across 641 landing sites and somewhere between 7,600 and 12,000 canoes, in seven coastal districts: Kambia, Port Loko, Bonthe, Moyamba, Pujehun, Western Area Urban and Western Area Rural. Notice that range on the canoe count. Between 7,600 and 12,000. That's not a rounding difference, it's a sign that the country doesn't yet have a precise census of its own fishing fleet. That will matter when we get to data.

Zach Martin

Now the number that grabbed headlines. At the framework launch, Minister Dugba cited an estimated 700 million dollars in annual export potential for fish and shrimp, supported by technical and marketing cooperation with Iceland. There were also new bilateral agreements with China aimed at modernizing fishing methods and adding processing value. I want to be very careful with that 700 million figure. It's a sovereign target, an ambition, a projection. It isn't realized cash flow. The brief I'm working from notes that current formal fishery revenues contribute around 30 million dollars annually. So the plan points at a number more than twenty times larger than what the formal system captures today. If that sounds like a leap, it is, and a good investor doesn't dismiss the target or swallow it. A good investor asks what has to be true for the gap to close.

Zach Martin

Here's my own framing, and it's interpretation. Think about the difference between a 700 million dollar fishery and a 30 million dollar one as a leaky bucket problem. Some of the gap is volume, meaning how much fish is caught. But a lot of it, if the plan is right, is about capture. How much of the value stays in the country. A fish caught in Sierra Leonean waters and sold raw at a beach landing site is worth one thing. The same fish iced, cold stored, graded, processed and traced to an export buyer is worth quite a bit more, and the margin gets earned by whoever owns the cold room and the paperwork. So the plan's targets are really a bet on the middle of the value chain. And that's exactly where the pillars of the strategy put their money.

Zach Martin

Let's walk through the six thematic pillars, because together they read like a balance sheet. Pillar one is food security and economic diversification. This is the artisanal transition from wooden dugout canoes to fiberglass vessels, plus cold rooms, ice plants, net exchange programs, fish feed, mariculture, and an ultramodern fish harbor complex planned at Black Johnson. Pillar two is marine transport, ports and shipping, including free port development, container turnaround efficiency, local ferry manufacturing and lighthouse rehabilitation. Pillar three covers marine environment protection and blue carbon, with a goal of reaching 30 percent marine protected area coverage by 2030, instituting marine spatial planning, integrated coastal zone management and oil spill response.

Zach Martin

Pillar four is surveillance and enforcement. Drones, satellite monitoring, and joint patrols between the Navy and the Maritime Wing against piracy and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, which people shorten to IUU. Pillar five is blue energy, minerals and innovative financing. That includes tidal, wave and floating solar pilots, blue bonds, debt for nature swaps, controls on sand mining, and offshore petroleum management. Pillar six is blue governance, science and research, including a dedicated Blue Economy Secretariat housed at the planning ministry under an inter ministerial steering committee, backed by the Institute of Marine Biology and Oceanography. If you read those in order, you can see the logic. Pillar one builds the productive assets, two builds the logistics, three protects the base, four protects the revenue, five funds the whole thing, and six tries to keep it all organized.

Zach Martin

Pillar five deserves a closer look, because it contains a tension that the framework itself doesn't hide. On one hand, the strategy lists blue bonds, debt for nature swaps and marine protection. On the other hand, it covers offshore petroleum management, where blocks have been licensed to Cluff Energy Africa, Innoson Oil and Gas, and there's an expanded 11,516 square kilometer concession with Netoil. So the same pillar that talks about blue finance also talks about oil blocks. UNEP FI, for what it's worth, has published guidance on what it calls harmful marine extractives, including offshore oil and gas, as well as recommended exclusions for financing a sustainable blue economy. I'm not telling you which side is right. I'm telling you that a sovereign balance sheet can hold both, and an investor who wants to touch the blue part needs to understand how the other part sits next to it.

Zach Martin

Now the blue carbon baseline, because it's a good example of a story that sounds big and turns out to be modest. West African regional assessments identify about 18,000 hectares of mangroves and 53,000 hectares of salt marshes in Sierra Leone. They hold, respectively, 8.4 tons and 14 tons of carbon per hectare. The estimated minimal avoided emissions value from carbon offsets comes to roughly 3.5 million to 7.7 million dollars per year. Compare that with the 500 million dollar standing fish stock and the 700 million dollar export ambition. Blue carbon, on these estimates, is a rounding error next to fisheries. That doesn't make it worthless. Mangroves protect coastlines, nurse juvenile fish and anchor communities. But if someone pitches you a blue carbon market as the thing that will fund a national ocean strategy, run the arithmetic first. The brief calls it a minimal value, and I think that word is doing honest work.

Zach Martin

So where does that leave the plan as an investable proposition? Let me lay out what I'd call the three tests. The first test is institutional. Does the country have a body that owns the plan? The Blue Economy Secretariat housed at the Ministry of Planning, with an inter ministerial steering committee, is the answer on paper. This matters because one of the persistent complaints in the UNDP report is fragmentation, parallel initiatives that aren't coordinated, institutions working in silos. A secretariat at the planning ministry is at least pointed at that problem. Whether it has staff, budget and authority to coordinate the Fisheries Ministry, the Navy and the port authority is something I can't verify from the sources in front of me, so I'll just flag it as the thing to watch.

Zach Martin

The second test is financial. Can the plan fund itself as grants thin out? Here the framework leans on a mixture. International partners like Iceland for marketing and technical cooperation, China for fishing modernization and processing, the UNDP for technical support, and the financial instruments in pillar five. The risk I'd point to is the one the UNDP report names for the continent as a whole, that so much of the progress is externally initiated. A national plan launched in November 2024 was launched into a world where aid had already started falling, and in 2025 it fell by nearly a quarter. So the plan's financing assumptions will be stress tested by the exact trend we just discussed. The sources I have don't tell me how much of the plan is funded, and I don't want to invent that. What I can say is that its success depends on the transition from grant funded pilots to commercial and blended capital, which is the transition the whole sector is being forced into.

Zach Martin

The third test is informational. Can the country see its own ocean? A fish stock valued at over 500 million dollars is a number from the Ministry of Fisheries, and a canoe count that ranges from 7,600 to 12,000 tells you how much uncertainty surrounds the base. Investors in any asset class pay a premium for verified information and demand a discount for guesses. The blueprint's surveillance pillar, with drones, satellites and joint patrols, is in my reading as much about creating auditable data as about catching poachers. A fishery you can measure is a fishery you can finance against. A fishery you can only estimate is one you can only hope about. And that takes us from the plan to the plumbing, because every one of those functions, the cold rooms, the harbor, the monitoring, the exports, runs on infrastructure that most people never see.

Zach Martin

Let's go back to where we started, the cable. The ACE cable landed in Sierra Leone in 2010, installed through the World Bank's West Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program, known as WARCIP. For well over a decade it has been the country's single point of international connectivity. And it has a design life of 25 years, and according to the brief, it's approaching the end of that lifespan within the next two to three years. So Sierra Leone faces two risks stacked on top of each other. One is accident, the kind of event we saw in March 2024, when multiple undersea cuts off West Africa severed ACE and caused severe internet and banking blackouts. The other is age. A cable that's old and alone is a piece of infrastructure with a countdown clock and no spare.

Zach Martin

Here's what is being done about it, and I'll stick closely to what the documents say. Under the Sierra Leone Digital Transformation Project, a 50 million dollar World Bank project financed through the International Development Association, the Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation issued terms of reference in January 2025 for a feasibility study on landing a second submarine cable. The terms of reference describe exploring options on the formulation of a consortium to land a second subsea cable in Sierra Leone. That's the exact phrasing of the source. A domestic group of mobile network operators and internet providers, named in the brief as Orange, Africell, QCell, Metro, Leonecom and Zoodlabs, is pursuing a commercial branch off Meta's high capacity 2Africa subsea cable system. I want to be precise about the status. A feasibility study is a study. It isn't a cable. As of my sources, I can tell you the effort exists, who's involved, and where the money for the study comes from. I can't tell you a landing date or a final investment decision, and I won't pretend to.

Zach Martin

Why is this a capital markets story and not just a telecom story? Let me give you the structure of the thing, because it's an elegant example of how aid and commercial money meet. The feasibility study is funded by a World Bank IDA project. That's concessional development money, the kind that absorbs early stage risk and pays for project preparation, exactly as the OECD described. The cable itself, if it happens, is being approached as a commercial consortium of private operators branching off a privately led system. So the grant money is paying for the thinking, and the commercial money, if the study says yes, would pay for the steel and glass. That's the aid contraction era's version of a good deal. Public money do the early, risky, unglamorous work, and private balance sheets carry the long term asset. If I wanted to show you one real world picture of blended finance, small slice of concessional capital opening the door for commercial capital, this is it. It's still just a picture of an intention, though.

Zach Martin

I think the cable matters to the ocean economy more than people assume, and here's my interpretation of why. Every blue finance structure we've talked about in this series eventually asks for proof. Proof that a fishery is not being overfished. Proof that the mangrove is still there. Proof that the vessel was where it said it was. That proof is data, and data needs a path. A country with one cable has a single point of failure for every digital system in its economy, including the ones that would make the ocean economy bankable. So a second cable doesn't just mean faster video calls. It's the redundancy that lets a government, a port, a bank and a fisheries monitoring system rely on being online. Redundancy is what turns a fragile asset into a financeable one. Lenders pay for resilience, whether it's a spare generator at a hospital or a second cable at a nation's coast.

Zach Martin

Now let's shift from glass to concrete, because the ports are the other piece of hidden infrastructure, and the numbers are worth sitting with. The Africa Blue Economy synthesis and the Zhou essay both highlight ports. PricewaterhouseCoopers research from 2018, cited in the Zhou essay, estimated that a 25 percent improvement in port performance could raise GDP by 2 percent. Continental port throughput, according to NEPAD projections from 2012, was expected to grow from 265 million tons in 2009 to over 2 billion tons by 2040. Those are projections, and the one from 2012 is old enough that you should treat it as a direction rather than a forecast. But the logic holds up. Most African economies depend on raw material exports and imports of food, manufactured goods and fuel. A port is where that dependence either becomes a toll booth that works or a bottleneck that taxes everyone.

Zach Martin

For Sierra Leone, the framework's second pillar covers free port development and container turnaround efficiency. And the brief makes the point that port efficiency at Freetown and Pepel is bound directly to inland road corridors, river transit and customs digitization. This is where I want to bring in Torsten Thiele, the founder of Global Ocean Trust, who wrote an essay for the Observer Research Foundation in October 2026 with a beautiful phrase. He argues that blue finance can serve as connective tissue for the ocean economy, linking inland and marine systems. His example is the Port of Rotterdam, whose navigation channels begin with a 57 kilometer deep water link to the North Sea, followed by 42 kilometers of port navigation area that connects directly to the European hinterland through a network of inland waterways. His point is that a great port is not a dock. It's the whole system behind the dock.

Zach Martin

Apply that to Freetown. You can dredge a berth and buy cranes, but if the road from the port to the markets is slow, if the customs system runs on paper, if the document that releases a container depends on a network that went dark in March 2024, then the efficiency gain evaporates. Thiele's connective tissue image is, I think, the right way to read the whole sector. An ocean investment is rarely a single asset. It's a chain, and the chain is as strong as its weakest link. A coach would say it this way. You don't improve your lap time by upgrading the engine when the tires are flat. Sierra Leone's port ambitions, its fish harbor at Black Johnson, its cold rooms and ice plants, all depend on links in the chain that don't look like ocean investments at all. Roads, customs software, power, and a second cable.

Zach Martin

Here's where the story gets interesting, because infrastructure is itself changing. Thiele points to Portugal's Atlantic SMART CAM subsea cable system, a 3,812 kilometer fiber optic ring that integrates environmental and seismic sensors. SMART in this context means the cable doesn't just carry data, it senses the ocean. Temperature, pressure, seismic activity, the kind of measurements oceanographers and climate scientists would otherwise need expensive ships and buoys to collect. So the same strand of glass that carries bank transfers can double as an ocean monitoring network. I want to be careful here. I'm describing a Portuguese system as a model, and nothing in my sources says Sierra Leone's second cable will include sensors. But as an idea, it's powerful. If a country is going to pay for a cable anyway, the marginal cost of making it a data source for its own ocean could be a good deal. That's a possibility worth asking the feasibility study about, not a claim about what it will find.

Zach Martin

That idea, dual use infrastructure, is the best answer I know to the aid contraction. When grants were plentiful, you could fund a cable, a monitoring system, a data portal and a research vessel as four separate projects with four separate donors. When money is scarce, the winning projects are the ones that serve multiple masters. A cable that earns commercial revenue from telecoms customers and also generates ocean data that the fisheries ministry, the climate scientists and the insurers can use is a single asset with several revenue or value streams. That's a better risk profile than four fragile projects. It's the same logic as a building with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. The more uses share the foundation, the easier it is to justify pouring it.

Zach Martin

Now let's talk about the part of the hidden infrastructure that determines whether any of this value stays at home, which is surveillance. The brief puts the numbers starkly. The African continent loses an estimated 11.5 billion dollars annually to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. West Africa is recognized as the primary global hotspot, accounting for about 40 percent of global IUU. And nearly half of all industrial and semi industrial illicit vessels globally operate in African waters. Now remember Sierra Leone's formal fishery revenues of around 30 million dollars a year against that 500 million dollar standing stock. I'm not going to tell you that the gap between those two numbers is entirely theft, because the sources I have don't say that. But it would be strange if a coast with that much valuable fish, in the part of the world with that much illegal fishing, weren't losing a meaningful amount of value to vessels nobody is watching.

Zach Martin

The infrastructure that answers this is not glamorous. Vessel monitoring systems, which track where licensed vessels are. A regional monitoring, control and surveillance center, such as the FCWC regional center in Ghana. Drones and satellites, which are named in the Sierra Leone framework. Joint patrols between the Navy and the Maritime Wing. Each of these is a piece of what the brief calls necessary prerequisites to turn fisheries into bankable, auditable assets. I find that phrase clarifying. Surveillance isn't just enforcement. It's the audit trail. A lender looking at a fishery wants to know the catch is legal, the quota is respected and the revenue can be traced. A premium buyer abroad wants traceability. A fisheries ministry wants to collect licensing fees from vessels it can actually identify. In every case, the thing being purchased is trust in a number, and trust in a number requires an instrument that produces it.

Zach Martin

Put it all together and you get a picture of Sierra Leone's ocean economy as layers. At the bottom, physical connectivity, the cable and the ports and the roads. Above that, information, the monitoring systems, the traceability and the data. Above that, productive assets, the fiberglass boats, the cold rooms, the ice plants, the fish harbor. And at the top, the revenue, whether that's the 30 million dollars captured today or the 700 million dollar target. The mistake investors and policymakers make is to start at the top and ask about revenue. The discipline of this approach says start at the bottom. Fix the layer that everything else sits on. And that's a lesson I'd extend well beyond Sierra Leone. Compounding works on infrastructure the same way it works on habits. Small, boring, foundational improvements, made consistently, make everything above them more productive. Which sets up the last question, and it's the one that I think is the most contested in the whole field. Not how to fund these layers, but on whose terms.

Zach Martin

I want to spend the last part of the episode on an argument rather than a statistic. It comes from Global South scholarship, and in particular from the January 2026 essay by Xingcan Zhou, published by the Inclusive Society Institute in Cape Town. I'll present it as that author's argument and tell you where I think it's strong and where an investor should push back. The core claim is this. The existing architecture of blue finance, the principles, the guidelines, the classification standards, has been largely written by institutions led by developed countries, and that rule setting shapes what gets funded. Zhou writes that Western countries influence project designs through rule setting, mandating that funds be allocated to ecological conservation rather than industrial upgrading. The result, the essay argues, is that African countries risk being trapped in what it calls a cycle of low value added industrial lock in.

Zach Martin

Let me give you the evidence the essay marshals, so you can judge it. The UNEP FI Principles for Sustainable Blue Economy Finance were jointly launched in 2018 by the European Commission, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the World Resources Institute and the European Investment Bank. Over 80 institutions have signed or joined them, according to the essay's citation of 2023 UNEP FI data. In 2022 the International Finance Corporation issued its Blue Finance Guidelines, establishing the first global blue asset classification standards. In 2023 came new guidance on blue bonds. That's the ICMA and IFC material we covered in the earlier episode, so I'll say again that these are serious, useful documents. Zhou's argument isn't that they're bad. It's that who wrote them matters, and the essay says the UN's current framework treats the marine spaces of Global South countries mainly as resource carriers and tools for achieving agenda goals, rather than as sovereign territory with development needs of its own.

Zach Martin

The essay identifies three institutional contradictions, and I'll paraphrase them. First, rule making authority is concentrated in international financial institutions led by developed countries, so Global South countries are often in the position of passive acceptance on standards and fund allocation. Second, the sovereignty of coastal states is diluted by the framing of the ocean as a global public good, while the rules fail to set up fair benefit sharing. The essay says the flow of proceeds from marine resource development is disconnected from the development needs of the resource owning countries. Third, governance mechanisms underrepresent Global South voices. Now, that is a scholarly critique with a particular vantage point, and the essay itself carries a disclaimer that its views don't necessarily represent the institute. But it's pointing at something real. Look at the instruments I described earlier. Blue bonds, debt for nature swaps and marine protected areas are all conservation centered tools. If those are the instruments that attract capital, then conservation is what gets built.

Zach Martin

Here's the African counter model, as the essay and the brief describe it. It can be summarized in three phrases: livelihood security, industrial upgrading, governance equality. First, livelihood security. Africa holds about 20 percent of global fishery resources, and World Bank projections cited in the essay indicate that scaled aquaculture could address food security for 200 million people and boost export earnings by 2030. Second, industrial upgrading. Expanding domestic processing and cold chain facilities so countries export finished, graded, traceable product instead of raw catch, capturing the margin. Third, governance equality, meaning sovereign rights over maritime revenues and coastal licensing. Notice that these three line up almost exactly with Sierra Leone's first pillar, with its cold rooms, ice plants, fiberglass vessels, mariculture and fish harbor, and with the processing value added in the China cooperation, and the marketing cooperation with Iceland. So the national plan reads, to me, like an attempt to do the industrial upgrading the essay says the conservation focused rule books tend to neglect.

Zach Martin

Now let me give you the other side, because I promised I'd tell you where an investor should push back. The conservation side would say that without protection, there is no fishery to upgrade. Illegal fishing, habitat loss and overexploitation destroy the resource base, and the UNEP FI material is explicit that rapid unsustainable growth of ocean sectors creates regulatory, market, reputational and physical risks for financial institutions and their clients. That's a fair point, and it's an investor's point, not just an environmentalist's. A processing plant with no fish is a stranded asset. And the UNDP report frames the solution not as conservation versus industry but as linking the two. Its central message is that Africa's blue transition will only be achieved when environmental objectives are explicitly linked to economic transformation and job creation. So the more careful reading is that the clash is real, but the resolution both sides gesture at is the same: protection and production financed together, on terms the coastal state helps write.

Zach Martin

There's a useful middle position in Thiele's essay, too. He argues that blue economy finance will be most effective when anchored in the Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Principles and targeted at what he calls blue line sectors, those that offer the greatest opportunity and impact in the transition to sustainability. He notes that institutions like Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank have adopted this approach and see strong growth opportunities in sustainable ocean solutions. But he also says that finance has to consider the country as a whole and provide resources across all components of critical blue infrastructure. I'd read that as a bridge. Use the principles as a quality filter, but don't let them define a narrow menu of what counts. A cold chain that reduces post harvest waste and brings a better price to fishing communities is arguably as blue as a marine protected area, if it comes with the controls that keep the fishery healthy.

Zach Martin

So what should you watch for, whether you're an investor, a policymaker or just someone trying to make sense of this field? Let me offer five markers, and I'll frame them as things to check rather than predictions. One. Disbursement, not commitment. Remember that 38 percent of ocean ODA commitments between 2010 and 2023 went undisbursed. When you see a headline pledge, ask how much has actually moved. Two. The composition of the money. If the lion's share goes into ports and large transport projects, as more than 60 percent of ocean ODA did, then the information layer, traceability, data systems, monitoring, is probably starved. Three. The second cable. Does the feasibility study turn into a consortium, a financing structure and a landing plan before the ACE cable's design life runs out in the next two to three years? That is a clean, observable test of whether blended finance can deliver under time pressure.

Zach Martin

Four. The gap between the 700 million dollar target and the 30 million dollar baseline. Watch for evidence of capture. More landing sites with ice and cold storage, a working harbor at Black Johnson, formal export volumes rising, licensing revenue reflecting a better view of who's fishing. If the plan is working, you'll see the middle of the value chain thickening before you see the headline number move. Five. Who owns the project. The UNDP report's concern about externally initiated progress isn't a moral point, it's a durability point. Projects that a coastal state can run and fund from its own revenue survive donor fatigue. Projects that depend on outside sponsors tend to last as long as the sponsors' attention. In a world where net ODA fell 23.3 percent in a single year, durability is the scarcest commodity in the sector.

Zach Martin

Let me close with the thought I'd want you to take away. In the earlier episode we talked about wet acreage, the idea that ocean rights are becoming an asset class. The contraction in aid doesn't undo that idea. It sharpens it. When the grant scaffold comes down, what's left standing is whatever has a business case, a governance structure and a way of proving its numbers. For Sierra Leone, that means a strategy launched in November 2024 now has to survive contact with a funding environment that is tighter than the one it was written in. It means a single glass fiber that failed in March 2024 needs a sibling. It means a fish stock valued at over 500 million dollars needs to be counted, watched and processed at home. None of that is dramatic. It's a series of small, disciplined, compounding improvements to the plumbing, which is how most durable value gets built. The ocean was never short of potential. It's been short of the boring, reliable systems that turn potential into income. That's the work, and in a thinner aid era, it's the work that decides who gets paid. This has been Ocean Capital on KMKT IR Hub Radio. I'm Zach Martin. Thanks for listening, and keep your eye on the plumbing.