Connect
We link researchers, policymakers, ocean advocates, practitioners, and communities across the basin through a shared bilingual digital space, so evidence produced in one country becomes usable and actionable in another.
A shared space for the sea we hold in common
Learn. Connect. Protect the Ocean.
01 — Who we are
Who We Are
We are a Mediterranean initiative built to close the gaps that no single institution can bridge alone: the divide between what is known about the sea and what is done about it, and the distance between the two shores of the same basin.
Blue Yamm is a bilingual Arabic–English digital space that connects researchers, policymakers, advocates, practitioners, and communities across the southern Mediterranean and its connected seas. We are neither a single programme nor the property of any one shore. We are the connective layer — the place where scientific findings, community practice, policy work, and the ambition of the next generation meet, and where they can inform one another rather than run in parallel.
We work with fishers, researchers, cooperatives, universities, cultural heritage networks, civil society advocates, and public institutions on both shores of the basin, building the capacities each group needs to act on the knowledge the others hold. We treat the southern and eastern Mediterranean not as recipients of knowledge but as sources of it, and we treat the people who live off the sea not as beneficiaries of our work but as its authors.
Blue Yamm exists because the region does not lack expertise, commitment, or ambition. It lacks a shared space where all of these can converge — in both languages of the basin, on equal terms.
نحن مبادرة تهتم بالبحر المتوسط والبحار المتصلة به، أُنشئت لسدّ الفجوات التي لا تستطيع أي مؤسسة بمفردها أن تسدّها: الفجوة بين ما هو معروف عن البحر وما يُبذل لحمايته، والفجوة بين ضفتي البحر نفسه.
«بلو يَمّ» مبادرة رقمية ناطقة باللغتين العربية والإنجليزية، تربط الباحثين وصانعي السياسات والمدافعين عن المحيطات والممارسين والمجتمعات المحلية في أرجاء الجزء الجنوبي من المتوسط وبحاره المتصلة. نحن المكان الذي تلتقي فيه النتائج العلمية والممارسة المجتمعية والعمل السياسي وطموح الجيل القادم، حيث يستطيع كلٌّ منها أن يؤثّر في الآخر بدلًا من أن تسير في مسارات متوازية.
نعمل مع الصيادين والباحثين والتعاونيات والجامعات والمدارس وشبكات التراث الثقافي وناشطي المجتمع المدني والمؤسسات العامة على ضفتي الحوض، فنبني القدرات التي تحتاجها كل مجموعة ونزوّدها بالمعرفة التي لدى المجموعات الأخرى. ولا ننظر إلى جنوب المتوسط وشرقه باعتبارهما متلقّيين للمعرفة، بل باعتبارهما مصدرًا لها، ولا ننظر إلى الناس الذين يعيشون من البحر باعتبارهم مستفيدين من عملنا، بل باعتبارهم شركاء.
«بلو يَمّ» موجود لأن المنطقة لا تعاني من نقص في الخبرة أو الالتزام أو الطموح، بل تفتقر إلى فضاء مشترك تستطيع فيه كل هذه العناصر أن تلتقي، بلغتَي الحوض، وعلى قدم المساواة.
02 — Our mission
Our Mission
To advance ocean literacy and foster a sustainable blue economy across the Mediterranean and its connected seas by bringing together researchers, policymakers, ocean advocates, and future leaders around a common evidence base, shared capacity-building, and stronger North–South collaboration.
In the same conversation, guided by the same evidence, shaping the future together.
03 — Our vision
Our Vision
A Mediterranean and its connected seas where ocean literacy is a shared regional asset, where a sustainable blue economy is built on evidence and equity rather than extraction, where ocean advocates and coastal communities shape the policies that govern their waters, and where the next generation is trained, connected, and employed across borders rather than confined within them.
04 — The case
The Case for This Initiative
The Mediterranean is one of the most studied seas in the world, and yet one of the most fragmented when it comes to how that knowledge circulates and translates into capacity for a sustainable blue economy.
01
Ocean literacy remains unevenly distributed: research produced on one shore rarely reaches the practitioners, advocates, and public institutions who could act on it elsewhere in the basin.
02
Community and traditional knowledge held by fishers, women’s cooperatives, and coastal cultural networks is occasionally consulted, but rarely built into the evidence base that informs sustainable blue economy policy.
03
Capacity-building and skills pathways exist for the next generation, but are unevenly distributed and often disconnected from direct routes into blue-economy employment or leadership.
04
Ocean advocates working across the basin have limited direct channels into Mediterranean governance forums, and often build capacity in isolation from one another rather than as a connected regional community.
05
Language remains a structural barrier: most regional knowledge infrastructure operates in English or French alone, excluding large parts of the southern and eastern Mediterranean workforce, researchers, and the public from ocean literacy efforts.
06
Existing institutional platforms do valuable work, but were built for specific mandates — policy coordination, stakeholder mapping, or research dissemination — rather than as shared, everyday infrastructure connecting all of these actors to one another.
05 — What we do
What We Do
Our work is organised around three commitments: to ocean literacy, to a sustainable blue economy, and to the next generation.
Empower
We build the capacities that enable people to act on knowledge, not just receive it: ocean-literacy resources for the public, recognised sustainable blue-economy skills and career pathways for the next generation, and tools for community-generated knowledge — from citizen science to traditional ecological practice — to be documented and valued on equal footing with formal research.
Mobilise
We give ocean advocates, cooperatives, and local networks a direct route into Mediterranean and international policy conversations, so that governance of the sea is shaped by researchers and communities together, in service of a genuinely sustainable blue economy.
06 — Our scope
One Basin, Connected Seas
We work across the Mediterranean as a single interconnected system — north and south, east and west — and extend our reach to the seas connected to it, recognising that currents, migratory species, shipping routes, and the shared future of a sustainable blue economy do not stop at sub-basin boundaries. Our bilingual design is a deliberate response to this geography: it is built so that southern and eastern Mediterranean researchers, ocean advocates, and the next generation are full participants in ocean literacy from the start, not an afterthought brought in through translation.
07 — Who we work with
Who We Work With
We design capacity-building with these groups, not only for them. Every tool, dataset, and training pathway on the platform is shaped by the people expected to use it, and tested against what they actually need to advance ocean literacy and act on it.
The observatory
Articles
Long-form research and analysis from across the basin, published in Arabic and English side by side. The language you choose here stays with you into the article.
Coastal science
Not Climate Change Alone: The Hidden Driver Accelerating Sea-Level Rise
The land under many of the world’s biggest coastal cities is sinking — and it is more than doubling the sea-level rise those cities actually experience.
Policy and economy
The Blue Economy: An Untapped Engine of Growth
Ocean-linked industries already support nearly 50 million jobs across Africa. The gap is no longer recognition — it is financing, enforcement, and institutions that outlast political cycles.
08 — Partner with us
Partner With Us
We are inviting institutions, foundations, and public bodies to help shape this platform at its foundation — to co-design infrastructure that advances ocean literacy, builds capacity for a sustainable blue economy, and connects researchers, policymakers, ocean advocates, and the next generation across the region for years to come.
Partnership with Blue Yamm can take several forms:
ندعو المؤسسات والهيئات الخيرية والجهات العامة إلى المشاركة في تشكيل هذه المنصة منذ تأسيسها، وإلى المشاركة في تصميم بنية تحتية تعزّز ثقافة المحيط، وتبني القدرات للاقتصاد الأزرق المستدام، وتربط الباحثين وصانعي السياسات وناشطي المحيطات والجيل القادم في أرجاء المنطقة لسنوات قادمة.
ويمكن للشراكة مع «بلو يَمّ» أن تتخذ أشكالًا متعددة:
If your institution already works on ocean literacy, sustainable blue-economy skills, or Mediterranean cooperation, we are not asking you to step aside — we are asking you to help us build the layer that connects and scales that work across the whole basin.
09 — Contact
Get in Touch
Whether you are a researcher with findings to share, an institution weighing a partnership, or someone who simply works this coast — write to us. We read everything that arrives.
Or reach us directly
- Hany Elsayed Helsayed@ogs.it
- Sally Elshalaqamy sallysalaah84@gmail.com
The group is open to anyone interested in the initiative — researchers, practitioners, students and partners alike.