Nigeria beats global average in female seafaring — FESAN reveal

By Precious Mark

Nigeria’s maritime sector has defied international trends by recording a female seafaring participation rate that is double the global average, stakeholders revealed on Thursday at the 25th annual Nigeria Oil and Gas (NOG) Energy Week 2026 in Abuja.

Speaking during a panel session centered on maritime capacity development, the President of the Female Seafarers Association of Nigeria (FESAN), Koni Duniya, disclosed that while the global average for women working at sea hovers around a mere 2%, Nigeria is currently hovering around 4%.

Despite this significant statistical progress, Duniya raised concerns over deep-seated structural, operational, and moral limitations that systematically push qualified women out of the offshore and shipping sectors.

She explained that many vessels operating in Nigerian waters completely lack segregated housing architectures, meaning operators routinely turn away qualified female seafarers under the guise of limited or unsharable cabin space.

The FESAN President further noted that qualified women are frequently disqualified during face-to-face recruitment interviews due to persistent cultural biases from hiring managers who believe women should not pursue sea-going careers.

She added that workplace harassment and bullying remain active threats, shifting the legal and moral responsibility directly onto asset managers to enforce strict workplace discipline.

Responding to these diversity challenges, the Managing Director and CEO of NLNG Shipping & Marine Services Limited (NSML), Abdul-Kadir Ahmed, stated that his organization has enforced strict gender-sensitive policies to level the playing field.

Ahmed stated that NSML ensures every intake of maritime cadets features a dedicated quota of women, a deliberate corporate strategy that recently yielded the deployment of the firm’s first female Chief Engineer.

He noted that shipping is a difficult job that keeps professionals away from home for long periods, but proper organizational support structures can make it highly sustainable for women.

On the training and regulatory side, the Acting Director of Planning, Research & Statistics at the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Silas Omomehin Ajimijaye, acknowledged that while the board invests heavy dollar capital into foreign seafarer certifications for women, retention remains an active industry challenge when candidates choose to leave the sector post-training.

FESAN’s Koni Duniya strongly countered this point, maintaining that capital spent on training women is never wasted as long as asset owners intentionally build supportive, safe, and inclusive in-house training centers.

She emphasized that female seafarers possess all the required technical skill sets and simply need the industry to create equal deployment pathways.