Dwindling Seagrass Is Disproportionately Impacting Coastal Women along Mozambique’s Inhambane Bay

"This is like our machamba [household garden] — we cultivate in the bay," explains a fisherwoman from Guiduane, an island community in Inhambane Bay, off the southern coast of Mozambique. As a gleaner, she fishes for crabs and oysters by hand in the nearby seagrass meadows which has become a source of income, food, identity and foundational to her way of life.

“I am a gleaner of everything: matewo [razor clams], mapalo [sand oysters], thogoma [sea snails], crabs and even shrimp,” she explains. “We collect, cook, prepare, dry and sell shellfish, getting money to buy food, clothes for the children, notebooks, uniforms and to build our houses.”

As a part of Mozambique’s artisanal fishery — a national designation which refers to community- or family-based operations that use traditional methods and low-tech gear — this gleaner from Guiduane is among 492 million people in coastal communities whose livelihoods depend at least partially on small-scale fishing, nearly half of whom are women. This sector provides 40% of the world’s fish catch and helps feed around 2.3 billion people globally.  

With a deep connection to the ocean, coastal communities like those near Inhambane Bay are also on the front lines of climate change as stewards of natural resources, holders of local knowledge, and custodians of coastal cultures and heritage. However, this interdependence heightens their vulnerability to the increasingly severe storms, sea-level rise and ocean acidification that directly threaten their livelihoods.

Despite having the most at stake, these coastal communities are routinely left out of the very decisions that shape the future of their coastlines — from marine conservation to climate adaptation and blue economy agendas. Women, who bear a disproportionate share of these impacts, are often the least represented.

The stories gathered here are drawn from WRI's research in Mozambique with Ocean Revolution Moçambique — part of a broader effort to understand and help close that gap.

The Gendered Impact of Seagrass Decline in Inhambane Bay

Inhambane Bay is a major estuary in southern Mozambique and home to nearly 20 fishing communities. Its seascape is characterized by a mosaic of coastal dunes, mangroves, mud flats and vast seagrass beds.

"It is in the seagrass beds that marine species take refuge, and it is these marine species that we sell to ensure the well-being of our communities on a daily basis and to provide for our children's education,"  a fisher from Maxixe, the largest city in the Inhambane province,  explained in Revista Presença Geográfica, a Brazilian academic journal.

But in recent decades, nearly half of Inhambane Bay’s seagrass meadows have been lost to increasingly frequent and severe tropical cyclones, compounded by growing fishing pressures. Such pressures are mainly associated with beach seine nets — large nets dragged along the seafloor which can tear and uproot seagrass.

Based on the unique ways men and women use the bay, they experience these declines differently. Women predominantly glean or use small mesh nets — locally known as “guínia" — to catch shrimp. These activities occur predominantly in shallow waters where seagrasses dominate. Working mostly on foot, they fish in areas above the low tide mark, which are often exposed during storms, most vulnerable to sun exposure and drying out as temperatures rise. These areas are also most accessible to disturbance from human activities.

Men, by contrast, often fish using traps or large nets, often operating from boats. Their activities occur in waters further offshore, where seagrasses may be less affected and where they can target alternative areas like deeper estuary channels. This means women are often more acutely and directly exposed to seagrass loss.

A guínia fisherwoman from Guiduane describes in our research how such losses are playing out: “We all rush to fish in the areas that have seagrasses because when the tide goes out, the shrimp enter … since there are few areas with seagrasses, all of us who use guínia nets rush to crowd there. It's true that the seagrasses are disappearing, just look … others fish where there are no seagrasses because the space with seagrasses is very small, so we don't catch anything besides very small things and small crabs without value here.”

The stakes extend far beyond income. These resources underpin other central aspects of life, including social cohesion. "We made friends on the beach, and we also harvest crabs together, we talked and got to know each other," explains a gleaner from Nhamua. A guínia fisherwoman from Kuguana explains how the shrimp she catches can be a source of identity that "allows us to move from one place to another and makes us feel proud when we go to sell it elsewhere. It is also exported abroad and essentially carries our identity with it."

In this region, women often travel farther inland than their male counterparts to sell fish, creating vital information networks between coastal and inland communities while improving access to affordable, nutritious food in rural areas. Declining seagrass resources, therefore, not just threaten incomes, but also food security, cultural practices, and social identities, with impacts rippling through the community and region.

The Barriers Women Face in Adapting

In Inhambane Bay, these gendered exposures intersect with deeper power dynamics that constrain women's capacity to adapt to a changing environment. Social norms discourage them from fishing further out to sea — considered both dangerous and incompatible with their expected domestic responsibilities. Furthermore, men typically control household finances, making it harder for women to spend money on more expensive gear or boats that would enable them to diversify their harvesting grounds.

As a result, women’s livelihoods are largely constrained to near-shore areas, and their use of guínia nets present additional risks. Guínia nets, though traditional in the area, are prohibited under Mozambique's fishing regulations due to their small mesh size, which catches juvenile fish before they can reproduce and reduces long-term fish populations.

Enforcement has historically been weak, but it is likely to intensify as Mozambique rolls out expanded bans on all beach seine nets. Guínia net fishers therefore face compounding risks that go beyond declining seagrass habitat. These include potential fines and equipment seizure, alongside the ecological consequences of overharvesting by fishing with these fine-mesh nets.

Women also face challenges beyond harvesting. Most women who sell fish operate informally — on streets or door-to-door in urban and rural areas. Male traders, by contrast, access more diverse and higher-end markets like hotels and restaurants in part because they have access to better transport like refrigerated trucks, and higher levels of education that enables them to learn other languages such as Portuguese and English. The concentration of women using low-gear, nearshore fishing practices and informal markets feeds perceptions that their fishing activities are less legitimate than men's. Layered onto existing structural barriers, these perceptions reinforce women's near-absence from decision-making, including in Community Fisheries Councils, which are overwhelmingly male.

High exposure to seagrass loss, multi-dimensional dependence on these ecosystems and systemic barriers to adaptation converge to make women disproportionately vulnerable to seagrass declines. Yet women aren't without their own unique strengths. Even without representation in the councils, they maintain strong informal networks to navigate fishing practices and other areas of their lives. For example, many women are part of rotating savings groups, which can provide both a trusted social network and a source of financial cushion against shocks. Many also diversify their livelihoods — fishing at low tide, then returning to tend family farms when the tide rises — a pattern that makes them more resilient if one source of food or income fails. At the same time, women in coastal communities are not a monolith. Their roles, relationships with fisheries and resilience vary depending on economic status, the prevalence of specific gender norms, cultural expectations and other factors that differ within and across communities.

Gender-Blind Policies

Although it’s clear that coastal people are at the heart of thriving ocean economies and resilient communities, their needs are not always fully represented in ocean decision-making or policies.

In Mozambique, female-dominated practices such as gleaning and guínia fishing, are not captured within the national fisheries monitoring system. For guínia fishing, this gap is compounded by its prohibited status, which both excludes it from official monitoring and discourages fishers from registering their gear. Women’s post-harvest activities are even more invisible, as they lack dedicated data systems altogether.

As a result, national planning and regulations meant to protect marine areas or restrict certain kinds of fishing gear don’t take into consideration women’s fishing practices, running the risk of restricting women's access to fishing grounds and livelihoods without providing viable alternatives. This not only creates hardship but can also weaken community support for conservation measures.

Several examples in Mozambique illustrate these impacts:

• The national shrimp closure — a seasonal ban on shrimp fishing with any gear type — was expanded to Inhambane Bay from 2022 to 2023, disproportionately impacting guínia net fishers who depend on shrimp to feed their families and pay school fees. The policy ultimately failed due to widespread non-compliance.
• In Quirimbas National Park, zoning regulations displaced women octopus fishers on Ibo Island from their traditional fishing grounds and disrupted their market access when larger vessels that previously docked there to purchase their catch were restricted from entering.

Adaptation policies suffer from similar blind spots. Without information on the specific barriers women fishers face, support systems fail to reach them. For example, the underrepresentation of women in Community Fisheries Councils leadership and decision-making structures reduces their access and control over key resources such as cold storage, processing equipment, as well as trainings focused on ecosystem-based management. This leaves them more vulnerable to post-harvest losses and less equipped to participate meaningfully in management and restoration interventions that affect the ecosystems on which they depend.

Recognizing Coastal Communities

Coastal communities are central to protecting biodiversity, building sustainable economies and adapting to climate change. Yet the policies meant to support these goals too often lack the information needed to account for them. The people rendered most invisible are often those already experiencing the greatest marginalization: women, small-scale operators, Indigenous and local peoples, and youth. This gap leaves both decision-makers and communities poorly served.

When a fisherwoman describes the bay like her “machamba” she’s articulating something fundamental: a personal relationship to the bay that’s central to her survival and rooted in stewardship. Directly exposed to seagrass decline and deeply interdependent with these ecosystems, the bay’s fisherwomen are some of the first to notice environmental change and among the best positioned to mobilize for protection and restoration.

For coastal communities, and especially women and other marginalized groups within them, to play their rightful role in building the resilient coastal futures we all depend on, policies must finally see them clearly enough to support them. This means building data and planning systems that represent the knowledge, needs and capacities of diverse groups within these communities.

The Ocean Dependence Framework

The insights we learned from the people of Inhambane Bay are part of WRI's research developing and piloting the Ocean Dependence Framework — a decision-support tool that helps policymakers, planners and practitioners understand how people depend on ocean resources. These insights are key to ensuring that climate and conservation investments reach those most dependent on the ocean, rather than compounding the pressures they already face.

The framework is just one piece of a growing toolkit — alongside approaches such as co-producing sustainable ocean plans and incorporating social and cultural dimensions into ocean accounting — that can make ocean governance genuinely accountable to the people most dependent on it. The challenge now is getting these tools into the hands of planners and policymakers who can act on them, at a pace that matches the changes coastal communities are already facing.