Assessing the Impact of Skills-Development Initiatives on Women’s Career Resilience in Tanzania’s Maritime Sector

Wardat Mahmoud Shaaban; Lucas Mwisila

doi:10.18535/sshj.v9i10.1977

Abstract

Women hold less than 2 % of seafaring roles worldwide and an even smaller share in Tanzania, largely because access to technical training remains gender skewed. Guided by Social Learning and Transformational Leadership theories, this mixed methods study assesses how mentor supported skills development initiatives influence women’s career resilience at the WOMESA hub in Dar es Salaam. Survey data from 65 female maritime professionals and 18 in depth interviews were analysed with SPSS v28 and NVivo 14. Skills development correlated strongly with resilience (r = .71, p < .01) and retained a significant independent effect in a hierarchical regression (β = .31), even after networking and psychosocial support were controlled, lifting explained variance to 67 %. Qualitative themes “tool kit empowerment,” “certification acceleration,” and “confidence transference” revealed that short courses, mentor brokered sponsorships, and crisis- shadowing collectively boost self-efficacy. However, resource bottlenecks (“male-first” sponsorship norms, limited simulator slots) temper these gains. The findings show that equitably funded, mentor guided training is catalytic for women’s adaptability and advancement, offering actionable guidance for maritime policy makers and organizations aiming to build an inclusive, resilient Blue Economy workforce.

Keywords

Career ResilienceSkills DevelopmentMentorshipWomen in MaritimeTanzania

References

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[refR-5] Connor, K. M., & Davidson, J. R. T. (2003). Development of a new resilience scale: The Connor– Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Depression and Anxiety, 18(2), 76–82. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.10113DOI ↗Google Scholar ↗

[refR-6] Creswell, J. W., & Plano Clark, V. L. (2018). Designing and conducting mixed methods research (3rd ed.). SAGE.Google Scholar ↗

[refR-7] Field, A. (2018). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS Statistics (5th ed.). SAGE.Google Scholar ↗

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[refR-20] Mwasala, E. (2022). Female participation patterns in Tanzania’s port operations: A decade review.Google Scholar ↗

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