Friday 26th – Harvesting and drying seaweed

It was rise and shine at 7am to meet three local women who would show us what was involved in planting, collecting and drying the seaweed. To help us with interpretation, we had a local friend, Able, from the Zanzibar Adventure School. Small pieces of seaweed were tied to the ropes and left to grow for 2 weeks in shallow water. Thereafter they were retied and left for another month before they were harvested. The harvested seaweed was left to dry, where they lost about 50% of their weight, and each kg of dried seaweed was then sold for 180 Tanzanian Shillings (~0.18 USD).










After breakfast we had a lecture from Rasmus, one of the teachers at Zanzibar Adventure School, about the environmental impacts associated with growing seaweed. He also described another project in testing phases about using seaweed as a fertilizer. At the moment, local women are using a ‘slash and burn’ agricultural method, where big parts of forests are burnt to release nutrients to the land to grow crops. This causes big ecological problems here as the land is destroyed thereafter. Rasmus also brought us to see the actual plantations where the testing was carried out.




After that, we visited the Seaweed Center, and seeing how much had been done was an awesome experience! Everyone fell in love with the buildings, even though they were not complete, and have a look at them for yourself in the pictures below!