 Wilkinson maritime communities often suffer merits of health and human rights challenges and are sought to reach the need for collaborative efforts to tackle them. Now these were the crux of discussion at a workshop put together by the Health of Mother Earth Foundation in Lagos. Details in this report. The country is highly endowed with coastal and marine resources and has several water bodies which serve as habitats to several species. However, the coastline is faced with numerous challenges including climate change, flooding, overfishing and pollution that have predisposed each to rapid and ill managed degradation. This workshop has been put together to address workers' health and human rights in the maritime environment. A lot of activities are going on. We have oil companies going offshore to explore for oil. We have illegal, unreported and illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing going on. We have human trafficking issues in our forced labor. We have several human rights abuses going on because of some of these activities that are carried on in the ocean. Dr. Francis Fagboulay is a public health practitioner. He raises concerns for workers and communities in the maritime environment. While highlighting the lack of access to health care facilities by residents in these communities, he is of the opinion that there should be consolidated actions by all stakeholders. The truth is that they are exposed to a lot of health hazards and because of that you find that particularly those in the coastal communities the health indices are poorer compared to the other places and we need to take cognizance of this and help them out concerning them. As residents from the coastal community share some of the issues they face experts say there is the need to develop institutional framework and an all-inclusive freshwater and marine protected areas policy to protect the aquatic ecosystem. The federal government when they promise they will promise they will promise they say they will give us engine they will give us boats. When we have almost about 50 60 communities and they brought the engine like 20 can it be enough? One can even be for only one person. They are livelihoodals actually taking away from them and most of them are finding it very difficult to start all over again. So they are looking for interventions people that can really give them assistance as in fishing nets maybe help them with boats too. So I have to come here to represent them because I feel that they need the assistance. You hear issues of overfishing people fishermen no longer have the usual catch that they normally used to so the issues are they are on the rise. Other speakers highlighted the roles of labor unions and CESOs in the protection of human rights in the maritime environment among other issues. Hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our youtube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.