We will discuss our decade-long efforts to help develop a truly global ocean science community through summer schools. The Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School In Nigeria and Ghana (COESSING; https://coessing.org) has been held for one week every year since 2015. COESSING alternates between Ghana and Nigeria. We held our tenth anniversary COESSING in Ghana in August 2025. From 2025-2028, the West African COESSING school will be embedded within the large Ocean Margins Initiative (OMI) research project (~9M USD), supported by Schmidt Sciences. OMI funding allows for "big ocean science" to be done on an unprecedented scale in the Gulf of Guinea. The connections developed within the COESSING summer school were essential in the genesis of the Schmidt-funded OMI project, and COESSING will serve as a meeting and networking forum for that project. Plans to hold the 2026 COESSING in Nigeria are already underway. Over ten years, we have had about 1000 in-person participants and about 250 in-person instructors at COESSING. Instruction has evolved towards hands-on research tracks in areas such as Marine Plastics, Physical Oceanography, Biogeochemistry, Fisheries Management, and the Ocean Margins Initiative. In September 2025, we held the inaugural Coastal Ocean School in the Western Indian Ocean (COES-WIO), at Technical University of Mombasa, again with a focus on research tracks. COES-WIO featured about 75 in-person participants from around the Western Indian Ocean region, and about 20 in-person instructors from around the world. We have funding to run COES-WIO in 2026. Pending further funding, we plan to rotate the school around different schools in the region. Our summer schools hosted in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya allow scientists from the US, Europe, and elsewhere to travel to African countries, and see the challenges and opportunities in conducting ocean science in Africa for themselves. Countless collaborations, small and large, have been set up as a consequence of these schools. We are having ongoing discussions about creating more such schools in different parts of the world, including Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands region.