Gender, livelihoods & climate resilience centre women's empowerment, adaptation, and livelihood diversification through seaweed

Seaweed aquaculture is widely positioned as a flagship blue economy livelihood for coastal Kenya, with a workforce that is overwhelmingly women. Yet aggregate descriptions of the sector obscure substantial within-county heterogeneity and a set of structural constraints on the capacity of farmers, particularly women to capture value, manage climate risk, and adopt climate-adaptive cultivation practices. We report on a large-scale capacity-building intervention conducted by the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute in 2025–2026, in which 507 seaweed farmers from 17 groups across Kwale County participated in participatory training on cultivation, climate adaptation, post-harvest handling, business skills, and group governance. Drawing on attendance and demographic records together with a thematic analysis of constraints identified by farmer groups themselves, we document a workforce that is 84.4% female and predominantly over 35, with substantial ver 35, with substantial inter-group variation: the most strongly feminised groups are also the oldest, consistent with a process of selective male exit rather than straightforward female empowerment. We identify four cross-cutting constraints on climate-resilient seaweed farming: an embodied capability barrier (most women in trained groups cannot swim, blocking adoption of deeper-water, climate-adaptive cultivation methods); persistent infrastructure deficits in drying and storage; limited value-chain capture beyond raw-material production; and an extension architecture configured for event-based outreach rather than the in-situ mentorship farmers themselves request. Two locally developed cultivation innovations emerged from farmer practice and appear well matched to the older female workforce by reducing labour, mangrove demand, and in-water exposure, though their reported yield advantages await controlled evaluation. We argue that climate-adaptation programming for the WIO seaweed sector must incorporate swimming and water-safety training for women farmers as a low-cost, high-leverage intervention not yet systematically piloted in the region, and that the extension model should shift toward routine farm-level mentorship.