Why Tanzanian start-ups need finance to fight climate change

Under a blazing mid-morning sun on Zanzibar’s Jambiani coast, Rabia Hussein Ali leans into the wind. The tide is surging quickly. With cautious steps, she wades into the knee-deep water.

Her hijab, damp with sea spray, frames a face weathered by salt and sun. Behind her, polyethylene ropes heavy with seaweed scrape across the coral and sand. She grips them firmly and braces against the current. “It’s hard work,” she said. “But this is what feeds my children.”

Ali, a seaweed gather like many other women in Zanzibar, begins before dawn, when the heat is gentler. By mid-morning, the humidity is thick enough to taste and the sun unforgiving. Still, she works methodically, hauling rope after rope wrapped with seaweed toward the shore. Her hands, toughened by years in the ocean, move quickly but precisely — one slip could waste a week’s growth.

Scattered across the horizon, other women in bright hijabs bend over their plots, their lines of green and brown seaweed etching faint patterns against the Indian Ocean’s panoramic blue.