REBECCA KYEREWA ESSAMUAH, PhD

Rebecca Kyerewa Essamuah is a Senior Researcher and Programmes Manager at CEMLAWS Africa. Rebecca has working experience in fisheries management, women empowerment, and coastal governance. She teaches Oceanography at the Regional Maritime University.
Rebecca serves on the Sustainable Ocean Plan working group, by the Office of the President – SDG Office. She is a Secretary on the Coordination Group for Fisheries CSOs in Ghana, building synergies for sustainable fisheries. She assisted in the multi-stakeholder drafting of the National Integrated Maritime Strategy (NIMS) and its Implementation Plan and has made presentations on water quality assessment, avifauna composition, institutional capacity for coastal governance, and watershed delineation at several for a including the MAVA Symposium in Senegal, in May 2023. Rebecca is also part of the China Dialogue by Stimson Center, in The Gambia. In 2018, she shared insights into a developed decision support system for coastal lagoons management at a SWAIMS Workshop- University of Rhode Island.
Rebecca earned honours in her BSc Fisheries and Oceanography programme at the University of Ghana. She worked as a Teaching Assistant leading to her master’s degree where she conducted water quality on 7 coastal lagoons in Ghana, funded by the Dean’s Award by the Graduate School. In 2015, she was awarded a full doctorate scholarship under the USAID-UCC Fisheries and Coastal Management Capacity-building Support Project. During her ICZM programme, she was invited as a Visiting Scholar to the University of Rhode Island where she understudied professors in Coastal Governance, Marine Pollution, and Port Planning and Policy. Her thesis focused on developing a 3-tiered multicriteria decision-support system for prioritising management of coastal lagoons in Ghana utilising indicators of water and sediment quality, biotic health, and resource use.
Rebecca has taught Oceanography at the Regional Maritime University since 2014.