Blue Economy Skills

Thirty-three Commonwealth Member Nations are small states, many of them island nations better described as large ocean states. Their fisheries, tourism, shipping, energy and biodiversity depend on healthy seas, and tourism alone provides around 11% of employment in small island developing states (UN DESA, 2026).

The ocean agenda is accelerating. Only about 10% of the ocean is protected, so reaching the 30% target means tripling coverage in four years, and the High Seas Treaty, in force since January 2026, commits countries to capacity building and the transfer of marine technology (UN DESA, 2026). Every one of these commitments needs people with the skills to deliver it.

Blue economy skills combine ocean literacy, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, marine tourism, pollution and waste management, and ocean data, drones and robotics, with the entrepreneurship to turn them into livelihoods. Small states cannot each build this capacity alone. Shared, open courses and regional cohorts make specialist learning viable.

For many island states, the ocean economy is also where young people’s jobs will be, in tourism, fisheries, shipping and ocean services, if skills systems prepare them for it.

COL’s Youth Robotics for Blue-Green Resilience and Prosperity project, delivered with Antigua and Barbuda’s Ministry of Education and a regional council of ministries, tertiary institutions and industry, invited Caribbean young people to design technology for their own challenges, and 117 signed up (COL, 2026a).

Seven design teams of seven, aged 16 to 23 and mentored from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, are building robotic responses to sargassum seaweed on beaches and at sea, wave energy, destructive waves, soil health and farm security. One team has moved from a food-security brainstorm to an AI-vision land rover with soil-nutrient sensing; another has worked through early design challenges to hull and conveyor designs.

The other participants form a research, media and advocacy team, running six youth-led webinars on themes from ocean health to coastal resilience and writing a youth publication for CHOGM.

Teachers are part of the design. All 500 places on a free, 12-week robotics in education course, built on open educational resources, filled within days of its announcement in September 2026, and the UWI Global Campus is exploring certification so that the course outlives the project. The teams present their prototypes at the CHOGM Youth Showcase in St John’s on 3 November 2026.

The model is regional by design: focal points helped recruit participants, mentors work across borders, and the story of five mentor countries working together is part of what the young people will present.

Teams work to common rubrics and scoring sheets, and monitoring of participation and learning continues to March 2027, so that the evidence can inform the next cohort.

The project continues a longer story of small states leading on ocean learning. With the University of Seychelles and the James Michel Blue Economy Research Institute, COL has developed four MOOCs on ocean governance, marine resources, blue finance and coastal management, building on a first Blue Economy MOOC launched through COL’s Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) in 2017 (COL, 2020). More than 6,000 learners from over 70 countries have now enrolled (COL, 2026b).