Mundus maris at the 3rd African Maritime Symposium 2026

Upon invitation of the Policy Center for the New South in Rabat, Morocco, Mundus maris Vice-President Stella Williams from Nigeria was a speaker in the last of four panels sessions. The one-day event was convened on 13 May 2026 in the Moroccan capital under the motto “African Seas: Strategic Challenges in a Hyperconnected and Hyperconflictual World“. The four panels were titled respectively:

African Maritime Spaces: Strategic Assessment of Attributes and Limitations
The Blue Economy in Africa: Promises and Realities of a New Frontier for Development
Maritime Governance in Africa: Between Regional and Continental Frameworks – The Imperative of Consolidation
Africa in the Global Ocean? Strategic Positioning and Projections

Panel 4, from left to right: Prof. Stella Williams, Vice-President of Mundus maris; Taoufik El Ktiri, General Secretary of COMHAFAT, Morocco; Rim Berahab, Senior Economist, Policy Center for the New South, Moderator; Nuno de Noronha Bragança, Rear-Admiral, Coordinator, Atlantic Centre, Portugal

The high-level participation ensured insightful presentations and reflections about how the African continent, soon to be the most populous on the planet with a predominantly young population, wanted to position itself in today’s global multi-polar context of many tensions despite the fact that in polls across many countries the majority of people want peace, international cooperation and working towards better living conditions for all.

Stella’s talk placed the need for a better balance between bottom-up and top-down approaches to positioning Africa and its maritime policies squarely at the center of her discourse. She had titled it aptly as “Stronger bottom-up initiatives underpin opportunities for global solutions”.

She argued for stronger action against illegal, unregulated and unrecorded (IUU) fishing mostly by foreign industrial fleets that cost African countries hundreds of millions of USD in lost income. Even worse, it contributed to overfishing in major ways and destroyed the productivity of coastal ecosystems essential for livelihood and food security of millions. Updating national legislation and enforcement and strengthening the cooperation among public organisations from customs, port authorities to the coast guard and ministries in charge of different complementary elements of national policies needed to be priorities.

She then went on to emphasize that such approaches needed to be balanced with a much greater appreciation of local strengths and innovations. Taking concrete steps towards co-management and translating the Voluntary Guidelines to Ensure Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF) was going to add legitimacy and enforceability of national policies and their implementation. The SSF Academy successfully tested by Mundus maris in the drive to help operationalise the SSF Guidelines had great potential in this respect. The inclusive respectful dialogue in a safe space for many different actors associated with the sector provided for mutual learning and generating solutions for problems otherwise dragging on unresolved.

Stella also argued in favour of investing more in the education of young generations, a topic that has been close to her heart throughout her long career. She showed an example of teaching materials developed by Mundus maris together with teachers in Senegal and The Gambia to bring notions of the ecosystem approach to fisheries already to kids at an early age. The materials produced for FAO’s Friedtjof Nansen project were very popular with teachers, school children and even small-scale fishers, but unfortunately, the funding for wider distribution was not made available, though everything can still be downloaded from the Mundus maris website free of charge.

She concluded with an appeal to put small-scale fisheries at the centre of a sustainable blue economy, to strengthen local organisational and technical capacities; respect and emphasise cultural heritage for buy-in, to connect international agreements to local experience to enhance agency, confidence and fairness, not the least in the fight against IUU fishing. Last but not least, she invited all African countries who had not yet done so to ratify the BBNJ Treaty to sit at the decision table at COP1 in Jan. 2027 (18 out of 56 ratified, 36 signed).