The fourth Ocean Innovation Africa summit will take place in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 21-24, 2023 as the official summit of The Ocean Race Cape Town Stopover.

Hosted by Ocean Innovation Africa alongside The Ocean Race Cape Town Stopover, the event aims to highlight opportunities for sustainable growth of the African ocean economy to a global audience of ocean changemakers. 

The event is startup-focused, with the overarching goals of inspiring more ocean-conscious entrepreneurs, enticing more private capital investment, and catalysing more partnerships for the development and adoption of new sustainable ocean solutions. 

Pitch competitions, demo sessions, exhibitions and B2B programmes are all geared to showcase African ocean-impact initiatives to the global blue economy community. Plenary discussions will draw on the insights of innovators, investors, decision makers, and thought leaders to provide informed perspective on the challenges and opportunities within each sector.

“To bring about change at the pace and scale needed to address sustainable development goals we need disruptive innovation, not incremental. As businesses cannot self-disrupt it is up to startups to bring that agility and flexibility to the model. Startups are key not only to unlocking the potential of the blue economy in a sustainable way, but, more importantly, to finding solutions to mitigate climate change, especially in the ocean space,” said Alexis Grosskopf, Ocean Innovation Africa co-founder and CEO.