Pip: Msimulizi Community News is covering the Indian Ocean this week — not the tourism brochure version, but the one where thousands of women wade in every morning to tend crops that hold an entire coastal economy together.
Mara: That's right. Writing for Msimulizi Community News, msimulizi brings us into Zanzibar's seaweed industry — the climate pressures bearing down on it, and what the global blue economy opportunity could mean for the women at its center. Let's start with the industry itself and what a decade of climate stress has actually done to production.
Seaweed Farming Under Climate Pressure
Mara: Zanzibar's seaweed sector has been commercially active since 1989, but the past decade tells a story of slow erosion — output that peaked, fell, partially recovered, and hasn't fully come back.
Pip: The numbers frame it clearly. Production dropped from roughly 11,000 metric tonnes in 2015 to about 9,700 in 2020, before climbing again to around 10,900 in 2023 — then slipping once more to an estimated 10,500 in 2024. That's not collapse, but it's not recovery either.
Mara: And the human scale matters here. An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 farmers depend on this industry, the vast majority of them women in coastal communities, relying on seaweed income for food, education, and healthcare.
Pip: So when yields fall, it's not an export statistic that takes the hit — it's school fees.
Mara: Exactly. The post identifies rising sea temperatures, shifts in water quality, and "ice-ice" disease — a bacterial condition that weakens seaweed and cuts yields — as the primary drivers. Higher-value Cottonii varieties have been hit hardest, pushing farmers toward lower-value species.
Pip: Which is the kind of slow squeeze that doesn't make headlines but quietly hollows out a livelihood.
Mara: On the response side, the post points to the MAWIMBI Project, a Canada-based diaspora-led initiative. Arafat Mustafa of the Zanzibar Canadian Diaspora Association put it directly: "We are working with the MAWIMBI Project to identify practical solutions that will help women seaweed farmers access deep-water farming technology and reach international markets."
Pip: Deep-water farming, heat-tolerant varieties, local processing — the argument is that resilience requires more than planting more seaweed in the same stressed shallows.
Mara: And that value addition piece connects directly to who's actually doing this work.
Women at the Center of a Blue Economy Shift
Mara: The industry's climate vulnerability lands hardest on the people who built it — and that's where a second piece zooms in, on what the global seaweed market's growth actually means for Zanzibar's women farmers specifically.
Pip: The global numbers are striking. UN Trade and Development's David Vivas Eugui puts it plainly: "Seaweed can increase opportunities for income diversification, new business activities and local employment, thus empowering women, youth and indigenous people."
Mara: That market grew from five billion dollars in 2000 to seventeen billion in 2021, with applications now extending into biodegradable plastics, pharmaceuticals, and biofuels. Nearly forty percent of seaweed start-ups globally are now led by women. Zanzibar's farmers are already inside this sector — the question is whether investment and policy catch up.
Pip: The opportunity is real. Whether it arrives before the warming water does is the harder question.
Mara: What both posts keep returning to is the same pressure point — a community already doing the work, waiting on the infrastructure and partnerships to make it sustainable.
Pip: The ocean isn't waiting. We'll see what the next dispatch brings.
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