Ocean Innovation Africa 2024

Driven both by a surging global focus on positive ocean impact and the hatching of local maritime ventures, entrepreneurship and innovation hubs across Africa are setting sail to connect often distant dots. By specialising in all things blue, these hubs can play a pivotal role in aligning ocean health with the sustainable use of marine and coastal resources. In this workshop we invite you to survey the international ocean venture scene, learn about the case for and experience in blue hub specialisation, encounter fearless African blue hub pioneers, and to build robust connections that will enable safe passage to business success for a future flotilla of blue startups.

This workshop will take place in two parts, separated by a brief intermission.

The first, hosted by WEF's Friends of Ocean Action with Stanford University's Center for Ocean Solutions, will explore how to unlock investment to launch local innovation in blue foods. The second part of the workshop, hosted by WorldFish, will look at scaling innovations to transform aquatic food systems in Africa.

Despite the range of value they provide, investments in small-scale blue food systems have been low, with more priority given to projects with high short-term financial returns. New and emerging data and technology have the potential to help coastal communities manage their resources and access markets but securing investment for the development and broad deployment of these tools, as well as scaling across communities has been challenging. The goal of this proposed session is to consolidate feedback from Blue Foods investors to provide guidance for emerging ocean innovators, generate new innovations, and promote funding for ocean innovations for equitable and sustainable outcomes.

WorldFish has piloted innovations in countries in Asia and Africa that appear promising to transform the aquatic food systems in the countries of the project. To achieve impact at scale, we are implementing the Asia-Africa BlueTech Superhighway project (AABS), funded by the UK Government under its Climate and Ocean Adaptation and Sustainable Transition (COAST) program of the Blue Planet Fund. The project aims to achieve an increased use of innovations beyond the group involved in its initial design and testing. This is a process identified as the scaling of innovations. In this framework, WorldFish and its partners have an interest, both academic and professional, in discussing current experiences of scaling innovations in the area of aquatic food systems.

The session aims to collaboratively design the foundational framework for the first African Ocean Trust Fund dedicated to IPLCs, focusing on sustainable ocean management and conservation, and empowering these communities to preserve their way of life while contributing to broader environmental goals.

Coastlines are susceptible to a number of drivers that can cause changes in their structure. This includes sea-level rise, extreme weather events or human development. Understanding how the coastline of Africa responds to these pressures is critical to managing the coastline in order to protect the environment, coastal communities and economic value of each region.
But monitoring coastlines is challenging; they are constantly changing with hazardous conditions and intensive coastal monitoring is expensive and impractical at scale - and as a result is usually restricted to well studied local sites and populated areas.

Digital Earth Africa’s Coastlines monitoring service addresses this gap by using over 20 years of detailed satellite images to map the typical location of the African coastline through time. By providing regularly updated data for the entire African coastline, it can be used to understand past changes and to identify areas of concern for the future.

The outcomes of this workshop will feed directly into current and future initiatives of Digital Earth Africa and partners to facilitate effective collection, analysis, and presentation for effective decisions around coastal community resilience.

Business incubation programmes are currently emerging as the preferred approach to income and job creation in coastal communities across Africa. This pathway to sustainable development is driven by entrepreneurial minds and innovative ideas and propelled by a growing but still fragmented network of conservationists, supporters and funders. In this workshop we want to debrief on past coastal community incubation activities, share impending journeys, map the emerging ecosystem, and chart a course forward that makes the most of the combined intelligence, energy and resources at OIA 2024.

In late 2023, the OECD's Sustainable Ocean for All Initiative started to develop the first Guidance for Development Co-operation in Support of a Sustainable Ocean Economy (henceforth ‘Guidance’). The aim of the Guidance is to foster a common understanding of the aims and priorities for development co-operation for a sustainable ocean economy and to help identify and promote good development co-operation practices and innovative approaches to deliver more effective and coherent development co-operation efforts.
To develop the Guidance, the OECD has established an inclusive process. In particular, a Multi-stakeholder Group on the Blue Economy and Ocean was set up to bring together OECD countries, partner countries, the private sector, civil society, academia, and other international institutions. This multi-stakeholder group provides an inclusive platform for sharing knowledge, experiences, challenges and opportunities regarding the development of sustainable ocean economies in developing countries.

The consultation during the Africa Ocean Innovation Summit will be a critical opportunity to inform the development of the Guidance, and in particular to hear the perspectives and priorities for development co-operation for a sustainable ocean economy from representatives from the African continent and from the private finance seascape.

Developing solutions to ocean challenges requires a thorough understanding of those challenges and the factors that affect them. Universities are well-placed to identify impactful opportunities as well as design solutions, and science-based innovation is key to meeting sustainable development goals. But the innovation pipeline tends to focus on ideas that are ready to go to market, while the research community is not sufficiently integrated or capacitated to generate investable solutions from research.

Ocean Innovation Africa hosted a workshop online in July, bringing together African universities, ecosystem support organisations, industry experts, investors and innovators to explore means of facilitating the transfer of knowledge and ideas between these stakeholder groups and generating more support for and interest in science-based innovation.

Nelson Mandela University’s Centre for Marine and Coastal Research will host the follow on to this discussion in person at Ocean Innovation Africa 2024, looking at points like:
Earning capacity, career track, Academic merit system
University Research and Innovation Departments
Funding for Innovation
Collaboration with Industry
Outreach Opportunities

How can communities dependent on critical ecosystems such as seagrass and seaweed accelerate the regenerative blue economy? What do nature-based solutions for climate resilience, innovation and transformation mean in this context?

While seagrass and seaweed may be “lesser explored” blue carbon and nature-based solutions repositories than their more charismatic coral and mangrove counterparts, their potential as a nature-positive powerhouse need to be explored. This session discusses the actual and potential contribution of these ecosystems to a regenerative blue economy and explores ways of enhancing innovative solutions.