Shipping should target Africa to solve crewing crisis, says report
But investment is needed to ensure young people on the continent can access careers in maritime
A Lloyd’s Register Foundation report details how the industry can tap into an underutilised recruitment pool to solve its employment crisis
AFRICA could provide the seafarers’ shipping needs to end the crewing shortages that have dogged the industry since the Covid pandemic, according to a report published by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the World Maritime University.
The report is the first “deep dive” of its Global Maritime Trends 2050 series. That original project said shipping would need to increase the number of female seafarers to 25% to solve the skills shortage, or “tackle it by having Africa’s young and talented demographic play a pivotal role”.
Lloyd’s Register Foundation head of maritime Olivia Swift said the potential of Africa as a continent was “lower-hanging fruit” compared to increasing the number of women seafarers from around the globe, as the barriers to gender parity are more structural, such as increasing the number of girls enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects.
Swift said there was “no reason for maritime to feel that it’s not able to make a difference” when it came to getting more African girls into Stem subjects.
But the report cites systemic issues — such as the persistence of the false belief that women are less suited to maritime roles than men — that prevent women from even enrolling in maritime training courses in the first place.
So, while increasing African representation as a whole might be simpler than solving shipping’s poor gender equality standards, that too will require concerted action.
“There’s a real complacency on the industry’s part,” she said. “If we don’t actually ask where are we at the moment, and what are the barriers, then it’s a pipe dream.”
A key facet of this problem was education, but Swift said she was shocked when working on the report by the lack of data on enrolment in African maritime university courses.
More concerning still is the rate of students that, once enrolled, fail to complete their course. Bandari Maritime Academy in Kenya, for example, recorded a graduation rate of 55% over the past 10 years. Durban University of Technology in South Africa has an annual graduation rate of 22%.
Swift said while individual circumstances, such as simply running out of money, would be responsible for many dropouts, the clear finding of the report was that a lack of sea time put paid to many seafaring careers before they even started.
The report highlights the lack of roles within domestic shipping in African countries, which forces trainees to rely on international companies for jobs and practical training.
Swift mentioned some initiatives that are already providing placements for African trainees, but stressed the industry could do more.
Facilitating sea time was a fairly easy barrier to overcome, she said, and could be addressed immediately.
If shipping companies were to focus on just one solution, it should be providing a small number of cadetships which “would then snowball”.
The other major barrier is the lack of recognition of many African countries from the European Maritime Safety Agency’s minimum training standards for seafarers.
Recognition by both EMSA and the International Maritime Organization White List were “crucial milestones for a country’s maritime sector” the report said. It means seafarers’ certificates are accepted worldwide, particularly in the EU market.
This was another relatively quick fix, Swift said, compared to the structural changes that would increase enrolment (particularly of women) onto maritime courses.
“That’s a longer-term investment in girls into science and, in terms of African seafarers in general, it’s awareness raising,” she said.
The question for shipping is why commit resources and time to what could be a lengthy project, when there are other pools of seafarers that have a more developed maritime training infrastructure.
“I don’t know how much of an extra mile it actually is; it just takes a little bit of imagination,” argued Swift.
“It’s a small initiative to partner with a training institution. You can start off small, pick your geography, test it out and see if it works for you. Commit to a small number of seafarers for a short period of time. It’s minimal investment.
“Any company that’s serious about operating in decades to come needs to be acting now, because it takes time to grow that new pipeline.”
