Fund Women-Led Seaweed Farms in Tanga & Kilwa, Tanzania

"We don't get to ask for a better price. The buyer comes, he weighs it, he pays what he pays. Even when I know it's worth more, I sell it anyway , I still have children to feed." - Mwajuma Hamisi Kombo, Tanga

That's what seaweed farming looks like for many women along Tanzania's Tanga and Kilwa coastlines today, one of the few steady incomes available to them, done the hard way. In Tanga's Mkinga district, two in three farmers earn under $40 a month, and 94% say cost is the only thing stopping them from planting more. In Kilwa, women are paid roughly 700 TZS per kilo less than half what Tanga farmers get for the same crop, because they've never had the equipment or bargaining power to demand better.

Action For Ocean (AFO) works with communities to build trust-based community institutions to close that gap: groups of up to 15 members, majority women, formed around a Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA). The VSLA does three things a bank won't it lets members pool their own capital together; it creates a loan pool women can borrow from without collateral, the barrier that shuts them out of formal lenders; and it becomes the training ground for conservation stewardship, leadership, record-keeping, and best-practice seaweed farming skills, plus other income streams as a cushion against a bad season.

This work sits inside the Africa Fair Seaweed Finance Facility, a growing pan-African vehicle already reaching an estimated 1,200+ women farmers across Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, aiming to mobilize $50 million in blended finance and reach 25,000 women by 2030.

Equipment alone isn't the fix. AFO also negotiates buyer agreements under its Fair Purchase Principles guaranteeing farmers a minimum price and income regardless of who ends up buying the harvest and builds shared drying and aggregation points to cut the post-harvest losses that quietly erode a farmer's earnings before she ever reaches a buyer. It's already working: incomes on this model have risen from $30 to $80 a month, with a $140 target by 2026, and yields have climbed from 7 to 28 tons per group per year.

What your gift does:

• $25–$100 — contributes directly toward one farmer's equipment share.
• $1,000 — fully equips one woman with her own farming kit.
• $15,000 — equips an entire 15-woman group, debt-free, from day one.

Every group we equip now farms through the next planting cycle. Help the next one start debt-free.