About Us

Mafia Island Diving was founded in 2012 and operates under a reputation of stellar customer service, within Tanzania’s largest and oldest marine protected area. The centre offers its guests the full range of PADI courses and is the only owner-managed centre in the archipelago, with its leaders having a combined scuba experience of 20 years in East Africa alone.

Safety is paramount, which is evident in every aspect of the operation. With a maximum diver to guide ratio of 4:1 and unique, comfortable dive boats – Mafia Island Diving have redefined the way to scuba dive, making it so much more than just an underwater experience!

Mafia Diving is dedicated to the positive and sustainable development of the community, and as such favours employing locally, ensuring a love for the stunning underwater environment is preserved and passed on through generations. Each staff member is handpicked and trained in-house from the level of snorkelling guide to Divemaster.

Besides a shared love for the underwater world, they also nurture a sense of curiosity and a hunger for exploration, which has led to a number of dive sites being discovered and solely dived by them. Such sites include incredible muck diving just metres from the shore, to mid ocean pinnacles bustling with life!

In 2019 the Luxury Travel Guide awarded Mafia Island Diving the ‘Diving Company of the Year’ for the whole of Tanzania, a nice addition to their Trip Advisor hall of fame accolade that reflects 5 consecutive years of excellent reviews.

Mafia Island Diving offer you the chance to explore world-class diving sites from the shore or via boat trips to a plethora of vibrant reefs, walls and drift dives as well as seasonal visits to mid-ocean sandbanks and unpopulated islands. They also offer snorkelling trips, seasonal turtle hatching and humpback whale watching trips, cultural and nature tours and more!

Our goal is for our guests to enjoy themselves but also to do as little as possible. We carry your tanks, prepare your gear, wash your equipment and even pour your tea! Our dive groups are never larger than four divers per guide and our dive courses are taught on demand. We can speak 6 languages to make you feel at home and are always working on adding another!

All of our adventures are run off traditional Arabic inspired dhows in an effort to blend in as much as possible with the unaltered, seafarers of Mafia. All of their excursions are designed to showcase Mafia in its true, natural beauty. In their words; “we don’t believe in staging scenes or interfering with the natural environment. What you see is what we see, an unfiltered, unedited, first hand glance into Mafia, a sleepy set of islands that are bursting with colours, sights and sounds”.