FESAN: Nigerian Ship Owners Reject Female Seafarers

As the world prepares to celebrate the 2024 International Women’s Day (IWD), Female Seafarers Association of Nigeria (FESAN) has decried the prevalence of a huge bias against female seafarers by Nigerian ship owners. 

The President of FESAN, Koni Duniya, made the appeal while speaking at a special edition of Live Conversations on Maritime TV Africa in commemoration of IWD 2024 on Monday, stressing that only 5 percent growth in female seafaring in Nigeria has been recorded since 2019.

At the virtual live broadcast themed, “Female Inclusion in Seafaring: The Nigerian Case Study,” Duniya, observed that at the lower-end of cadetship FESAN’s record lists 100 junior cadets while only 3 are currently in the senior cadre of the seafaring career. 

Her words: “We have several female seafarers whose licenses have expired and they can’t renew it because they can’t land jobs. The situation is bad because manning agencies are directly telling females that ship owners don’t want them.”

“Many females remain at the bottom because of the gender bias in the maritime industry. Some others can’t progress to the senior level because they can’t afford the necessary trainings. For those whose parents were able to send them to school for the basic training, they can’t proceed further because of the high costs. Nevertheless, if they had been able to go onboard ships, they would could utilize their stipends to augment their fees to upgrade their certificates.”

Emphasising the importance of data of the nation’s seafarers, Duniya lamented that if everybody in the shipping industry in 2019 made commitment to foster inclusivity of women in the industry there would have been no place to find the female seafarers.