ABALOBI: ICTs for small-scale fisheries governance
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Fisherman using the app.
Abalobi
The ABALOBI initiative is a transdisciplinary research and social learning endeavour, bringing together stakeholders with traditional fishers taking centre stage. It is a participatory action research project with a strong community development component. ABALOBI, a free app/programme, is aimed at social justice and poverty alleviation in the small-scale fisheries chain, transformation in the way we produce knowledge, stewardship of our marine resources, and building resilience to climate change
Last update: 30 Sep 2020
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Context
Challenges addressed
Establishing a knowledge base, developing a logbook, empower fishers in value chains. Small-scale fisheries are data limited. As a result, fishers may not consider regulations derived from assessments legitimate. Stakeholders need to better understand the need for adaptive management, which can be done through catch and sales data, catch trends or oceanic and atmospheric changes. By establishing close relations with retailers, fishers can obtain better prices and explore traceability systems.
Location
Cape Town, South Africa
East and South Africa
Process
Summary of the process
Attaining sustainable fisheries and fisher communities, while also promoting governance reform and supporting policies, can only be achieved when accepting that many stakeholders have different interests and hold different views of the fishery. That must be the starting point. But it is also an on-going process. Awareness raising and education on a particular world view of how the fishery should be managed only holds limited benefits and in fact often tends to create tensions and conflict between stakeholders. Taking a few steps back, and creating a common knowledge base through social learning opens the door for genuine co-management, and integration of fisheries aspects that are not often tabled in decision-making processes. The two building blocks of this initiative mutually enforce and enable each other.
Building Blocks
Transdisciplinary social learning process
Social learning can be interpreted in many different ways. In the context of this project, social learning is embarked upon in a transdisciplinary way. This means various stakeholders, beyond just scientists, from multiple disciplines, began working together on this project by jointly framing the problem and the research questions. A participatory action research programme then ensued and led to the co-design of the tool. Different components were carefully designed based on the stakeholders’ input and then tested in real-life situations. A social learning programme thus helps the transdisciplinary team in further developing the tool, but also engage with the data.
Enabling factors
• Careful facilitation
• Openness to different views and images of the fishery
• Stakeholder support for the initiative
• A flexible platform that allows quick and easy refinement
• An enabling policy that allows for this type of engagements.
Lesson learned
Social learning processes are difficult to measure and are a long-term process. We set careful targets for the short-term and long-term. The short-term targets are related to uptake and use of the data, while the longer term targets are linked to the development of co-management plans and implementation of the Policy at national level. Sustainable use recorded through various fisheries indicators (biological and social) will aid in assessing the Policy objectives.
Co-design of the app suite and co-production of knowledge
The pillar of the Abalobi initiative is the co-design of the platform and all its modules, with the core stakeholders; i.e. the fishers and the fisheries authority. Fishers record daily info, some of this info is validated by the monitors as they take a daily sample. Fishers, monitors and local community leaders then engage with the platform dashboards depicting various insights of the data. The fisheries managers from the fisheries authority also then engage with the same information and regular workshops are held. During these workshops, common ground is sought, trends are discussed, and suggestions are made towards further improvements. The basic framework for co-management is slowly and carefully negotiated and designed. Using the common knowledge base, all stakeholders at the co-management table are able to talk about the same fisheries indicators.
Enabling factors
• Careful facilitation
• Openness to different views and images of the fishery
• Stakeholder support for the initiative
• A flexible platform that allows quick and easy refinement
• An enabling policy that allows for this type of engagements
Lesson learned
The recognition of local knowledge is paramount, and something all stakeholders must acknowledge. Fishers hold a wide knowledge base surrounding the marine ecosystem, and its uses. While oral histories or workshops can be used to enable sharing of this information, we have found that using a co-designed framework process is extremely powerful in finding connections and complementarity between local knowledge and other scientific data.
Impacts
- Fishers, monitors and cooperatives have actively recorded catches and associated variables in daily logbooks and dashboards. Regular workshops have assisted in fine-tuning the recording and reporting functions and use of the dashboard. As a result of gathering data and discussing emerging trends during workshops, fishers have written letters to the Minister to call for a stop on the overexploitation of a particular fish species, others have discussed climate change related implications and suggested new adaptation responses, and others have used the data to apply for loans to purchase better safety equipment.
- In November 2015, the Fisheries Minister endorsed ABALOBI as the official catch management system for the implementation of the new Small-scale Fisheries Policy.
- Fishers in one of the pilot sites have grouped together to discuss and prepare for the implementation of the Policy, and have successfully engaged with a retailer interested in purchasing several seafood species in a Fisheries Improvement Project that will see the use of ABALOBI towards traceability, and a type of Fairtrade certification.
- ABALOBI now initiated a restuarant supported fishery via the MARKETPLACE app where fishers can sell their produce at a fair price, and patrons can purchase fresh fully traceable seafood.
Beneficiaries
The small-scale fishers who use the platform in their daily operations, the Fisheries Authority who will the implement the new Small-scale Fisheries Policy, various Govt and non-Govt agencies promoting local development opportunities, Chefs
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 1 – No poverty
SDG 12 – Responsible consumption and production
SDG 14 – Life below water
Story
The small fishing village of Struisbaai is one of the five areas where Abalobi is being piloted. Struisbaai is near Cape Agulhas, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, with the harbour being the pivotal point around which the village operates. Sea and weather conditions determine whether fishers are able to go out to sea and when GroundUp visited the Struisbaai the conditions were poor, meaning that there were only a few boats out at sea. At midday the boats — many looking in need of repair — began to come into shore and offload their catch: yellowfin tuna, stumpnose and some small sharks were offloaded from the boats. Niklaas Joorst, the skipper of one of the boats, is one of the five fishers in Struisbaai involved in the pilot of Abalobi. He believes that the app “will help a lot of people” if all fishers in Sruisbaai could use it, with one of the major benefits being able to set prices amongst the fishers so that they have increased bargaining power. In the bigger picture this would also mean that the information that fisheries management is gets is accurate, up-to-date and reflective of all fishers in the sea. Joorst puts all his data into the app when he comes back from sea, saying that it has helped him a lot as he is able to go back over his data every month – looking at income, expenses and his catch. The Abalobi system would make the notorious “blue books” obsolete. The “blue books” are where fishers currently record data pertaining to their catch – a process that is time consuming and often does not result in adequate feedback to the fishers themselves. “The Abalobi is a much better system [than the blue books],” says Joorst. This is something that Josias Marthinus, a catch data monitor in Struisbaai agrees with. Marthinus’s job is to record data from each fisher’s catch, such as the weight of the catch and the species, which is then given to the department. Currently he has to write everything out by hand and the data is only collected once a month. “We sit with the data the whole month,” he says, “I use many [pieces of] paper per boat.” Marthinus has now been equipped with a tablet loaded with the Abalobi app, meaning that with a couple of clicks he is able to fill in the data for each fisher’s catch. Marthinus says that the data captured on the app can help fishers secure bank loans to fix their boats and can also aid in paying taxes as they now have detailed data on their income and expenses.
