Professional SCUBA diving may sound like a dream job; however, for many young people living in coastal Mozambique the opportunity may not be accessible, despite living minutes away from the beach.
The OCEAN team recently visited ‘Zero to Hero’ – an OCEAN-funded project which works towards addressing livelihood inequalities faced by marginalised groups in coastal Mozambique.
PADI courses are a route to becoming a professional diver and teaches everything from setting up a tank to rescuing another diver in distress. Once qualified, professional divers can make a good living working at hotels and dive centres, leading groups of tourists underwater and teaching others. PADI Qualifications are internationally renowned certifications, opening up global opportunities as well as local ones.
In Mozambique, professional diving jobs are over-represented by foreign nationals and tend to be inaccessible to locals due to high PADI Qualification costs, limited swimming skills, and language barriers. Members of the local communities often work lower-paid jobs such as cleaning dive gear and driving boats (“skippers”). For Mozambican women, there are further socio-cultural barriers as scuba diving is seen as a risky activity reserved for men.
A new opportunity
Mozambique is classed as a Least Developed Country (LDC), with more than 80% of people living below the international poverty line ($3 a day)1. Job opportunities for young people are few and far between but by becoming qualified dive professionals, young people can more than double their monthly income compared to a typical skipper salary.
Zero to Hero is an OCEAN project implemented by conservation NGO Ocean Revolution Moçambique in partnership with Maputo Dive Centre. Zero to Hero tackles financial barriers which marginalise members of local coastal communities from employment in the dive industry by funding young Mozambicans to become certified dive professionals. As part of the project, participants also receive English lessons to enhance their capacity to work with tourists.
Women and girls are more likely to be unemployed or not in education due to marriage and pregnancy, unpaid domestic labour or cultural norms which discourage women from working2. By empowering young women to participate, Zero to Hero is making important strides to improve gender equality by facilitating their access to professional qualifications and job opportunities. Success is evident already: one female graduate started leading groups of tourists on an internationally renowned shark dive, just seven months after joining the project.
Zero to Hero students after completing their dive training. Image credit: Maputo Dive Centre
Safeguarding the marine environment
SCUBA diving can play an important role in ecotourism. Ecotourism provides employment opportunities to people in coastal communities, whilst creating an incentive to protect the marine environment. For example, community members can sell boat tours with a 100% guarantee of a wildlife sighting. Protecting Mozambique’s unique marine biodiversity and megafauna (Humpback Whales, giant Manta Rays and Whale Sharks) upholds the country’s reputation as a dive tourism hotspot to support the local economy. Thriving ecotourism also attracts investment into local infrastructure such as roads, water, electricity and other services which benefit communities.
Ocean stewardship
Beyond promoting sustainable employment, Zero to Hero’s ethos tells an important story of ocean literacy, underpinned by the belief that people will be better placed to advocate for the protection of the marine environment if they understand it. In coastal Mozambique, interacting with the ocean (unless for fishing) is often seen as dangerous, and hence many people do not know how to swim. The estrangement between coastal communities and the marine environment they depend on is deepened by lack of local representation in the diving industry.
The Zero to Hero team carry out Community Awareness Talks, where they spread awareness about protected species and environmental regulations to communities living in Maputo National Park. They are accompanied by project beneficiaries: young men and women on the path to becoming fully certified dive professionals, breaking down perceptions about diving through representation.
Looking ahead
At the end of February, the project celebrated the graduation of its first cohort of PADI Dive Instructors as the team travelled to South Africa where participants underwent their final examinations. This is a huge achievement – after less than a year of diving participants are now fully qualified to make a living guiding their own students through PADI Courses.
Zero to Hero is aiming to graduate 20 dive professionals from local communities before project end in September 2028. Visit the project page to follow their progress, where you can learn about other work the project is doing to enhance local capacity for sustainable ecotourism and marine resource management in Mozambique.
This article was written by Sara De Giorgio, Technical & Fund Administration Assistant at OCEAN.
Image credit: Maputo Dive Centre
1 https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
2 Perry, H. 2022, The Status of NEET in Mozambique: A Quantitative Analysis of Youth Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) (15 – 24 years old) | Country Report
