Promoting hygiene and quality for fishery and aquaculture value chains
Full Solution
Insepection of fish quality
© Alena Göbel / giz
The Global Programme "Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture," implemented by GIZ, aims to enhance sustainable fisheries in multiple countries. Key challenges addressed include food spoilage, overfishing, lack of infrastructure, and inadequate quality assurance. The program provides targeted training on hygiene practices, thorough value chain analysis, and develops guidelines to ensure knowledge application. Partnerships with local authorities enhance compliance, introducing first sale certificates for improved traceability. Hygiene and quality control plans guide systematic checks across the value chain, from production to distribution, reducing post-harvest losses and increasing value chain actors' incomes. The program promotes sustainable fisheries management, ensuring fish products meet hygiene standards and increasing consumer trust.
Last update: 28 Nov 2025
78 Views
Photo and video gallery
Context
Challenges addressed
Fishing is crucial for global food needs, contributing to food security and driving the economy in impoverished regions. However, FAO reports that a third of the world's oceans are overfished, and 35% of fish meant for human consumption spoils before reaching consumers. This is due to fish's perishability and various risks throughout the value chain. Issues like overfishing, pollution, and poor infrastructure reduce product quality and complicate hygienic processing. Ensuring safe, affordable, and high-quality food is challenging, especially as the global population grows and demand for fish rises.
Spoiled food is wasted on a large scale in the fishing sector, while an estimated 923 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and 2 billion face nutritional deficiencies. Improving hygiene and quality in fisheries and aquaculture is vital to address hunger and malnutrition, aligning with SDGs 2 and 6 to ensure access to safe and nutritious food and improve hygiene in the sector.
Location
Mauritania
Uganda
Malawi
West and Central Africa
East and South Africa
Process
Summary of the process
Training in hygiene and quality practices, tailored to the needs of value chain actors, ensures the delivery of high-quality products from the point of catch to consumer. These practices are strengthened through direct partnerships with local food inspection authorities that enforce standards and improve compliance. Training enhances the knowledge of actors, ensuring they adhere to quality guidelines. Meanwhile, institutional partnerships provide the infrastructure and regulatory framework that support effective quality control.
Building Blocks
Promoting good hygiene and quality practices along the value chain
To ensure quality and safety in the fish value chain, from catch to consumer, it is vital to consider all steps of the value chain due to potential food safety risks. Implementing hygiene and quality trainings, introducing first sale certificates, and establishing control plans for state institutions are key interventions. A thorough value chain analysis is crucial for identifying improvement areas and requires visits to actors and a review of hygiene regulations. Based on this analysis, targeted interventions can be identified, ranging from policy to practical actions, involving research enhancement, regulatory support, and capacity development. The direct actors in the value chain are fishermen, retailers, traders, transporters, warehouse workers, and suppliers who play a role in the production, processing, delivery, or sale of products to consumers. They are the first point of contact for ensuring safe, high-quality products and therefore represent the primary target group for trainings on hygienic handling, storage, and transportation practices.
Enabling factors
Hygiene and quality interventions require context-sensitive training supported by infrastructure such as ice production, cold chains, and equipment. Training-of-trainers strategies anchor knowledge in local institutions, while association leaders or market supervisors act as brokers to spread practices. Consumer and buyer sensitization is vital, as demand for fresh fish drives adoption. Communication and dissemination must reflect local media capacities—printed guidelines or mobile apps—to ensure accessibility and long-term impact.
Lesson learned
Training must reflect the roles of varied actors in the fish value chain. While all need awareness of biochemical processes such as microbes, food-borne infections, personal hygiene, recognizing fresh and spoilt products, using ice to uphold the cold chain, and cleaning workplaces, fishermen focus on storage and cooling while processors stress hygienic equipment handling. Effective tools include on-the-job training, demonstrations, visuals, and tailored guidelines. Feasibility, feedback, coaching loops, and follow-up surveys are crucial for sustainable results.
Direct partnerships for institutional anchoring of hygiene and quality standards
In addition to the direct actors at the operational level, institutional decision-makers, independent quality offices, certification bodies and research institutions are key actors to implement quality assurance of fish products on a national scale. The complexity of the value chain, which interferes with the traceability of the product, and the significant geographical distances between fish producers and consumers present a substantial challenge in maintaining the quality of fish. Therefore, it is difficult to trace back the product's source when spoiled or inferior fish reaches the consumers. Fish production and distribution are conducted both formally (e.g. through organized cooperatives) and informally by individuals. In most developing countries, the fish value chain predominantly follows an informal market system with limited quality management and traceability systems for fish. In the absence of traceability, there are concerns about trust and transparency in the marketing and consumption of fish in terms of the quality, food safety and price of products, which ultimately affects both consumers and fish sellers.
Enabling factors
Partnerships with inspection authorities enable compliance with hygiene standards and strengthen traceability. A jointly developed hygiene and quality control plan ensures regular sampling and analysis along the entire chain, provided local staff have the required lab equipment. First sale certificates—preferably digital—help register origin, species, seller, and destination. Action plans with markets and auction halls, management commitment, codes of hygiene practices, and mobile apps all support implementation.
Lesson learned
Implementation experiences should be regularly discussed with political decision-makers, associations, and value chain actors to ensure lessons are shared and challenges addressed. Long-term success depends on integrating the costs of sampling and analysis into the annual budgets of inspection authorities and securing stable financial contributions. Clearing out financial obstacles is more effective when the hygiene and quality control plan is aligned with local political strategies. Sustainability must therefore be at the core of implementation. Digital tools such as apps or online certificates have proven valuable for resource efficiency, communication, and transparency, as they help register products and disseminate training materials. At the same time, experience shows that incentives play a decisive role: the discard of spoiled fish from the market is immediately linked to a loss of income, creating strong motivation for compliance with hygiene and quality standards.
Impacts
The interventions described here are intended to have two effects. First, they should increase the income of the actors in the value chain, as better fish quality is sold at higher prices. Second, the availability of (better) fish products on local markets that are suitable for human consumption should be increased as quality goes up and post-harvest losses go down.
It should be noted that training in good hygiene and quality practices, as well as compliance action plans and first sale certification, benefit consumer protection while helping to reduce food waste. If the quality of the fish is maintained throughout the value chain more fish of better quality can be sold, which leads to an increased income for value chain actors. At the same time, the consumer benefits as they can enjoy healthier fishery and aquaculture products and have a larger selection because more catch arrives the fish markets.
Also, other effects can be expected in addition to income generation and food security. Reducing post-harvest losses might be the most efficient way to bring more fish into the value chain without increasing fishing pressure on the already overexploited fish populations. In this sense, a good quality and hygiene structure in the value chain is inevitable for a sustainable fisheries management.
Beneficiaries
The solution benefits fishers, producers, processors, and distributors by increasing incomes and reducing spoilage. Consumers gain better quality and safer fish products, and government agencies improve food safety.
Sustainable Development Goals
SDG 1 – No poverty
SDG 2 – Zero hunger
SDG 3 – Good health and well-being
SDG 5 – Gender equality
SDG 6 – Clean water and sanitation
SDG 8 – Decent work and economic growth
SDG 14 – Life below water
Story
Malmouna Niang
© Alena Göbel
The hygiene and quality control plan for better protection of consumers of small pelagic fish in Mauritania
In October 2019, the government partner, the National Office for the Sanitary Control of Fisheries and Aquaculture Products (Office Nationale d’Inspection Sanitaire des Produits de la Pêche et de l’Aquaculture, ONISPA), launched the hygiene and quality control plan for small pelagic fishery products for local and sub-regional consumption.
The control plan is in line with the government's strategy to ensure the supply of high-quality and nutritious fish to the population. It enables ONISPA to strengthen its presence in order to protect consumers and improve food safety in Mauritania. The implementation of this control plan is accompanied by a training plan for ONISPA professionals to develop their skills in analytical and sanitary control techniques specific to the local value chains of small pelagic fish. Four laboratories were set up in Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Rosso and Tanit and a registration procedure for first sales certificates was developed and is enforced by ONISPA inspectors to improve controls and traceability of products.
The aim of the control plan is to control artisanal fishery products in order to verify that they meet the quality and hygiene requirements in the value chain. The measures of the control plan extend from coastal areas to the interior of the country and target artisanal and coastal fishing vessels, means of transportation, processing plants and distribution and sales outlets. This is the first time that the control and inspection measures have been systematically carried out far from the coastal areas inland.
