SAGE Findings:
- Little involvement of fisherwomen in LMMA decision-making, discriminated against because of mosquito net fishing.
- Lack of recognition of community rights to participate in LMMA decision-making.
- Major deficiencies in the process of complaints and follow-up of cases related to invasion of the reserves by the entire community due to the lack of inspection instruments.
- Deficit of collaboration and coordination, it does not share reports and plan of activities between different actors.
Recommendations:
- Involve mosquito net fisherwomen at all stages of LMMA establishment and prioritize opportunity costs for them.
- Disseminate information on rights to participate in LMMA decision-making to all community.
- Encourage community to report offenders and follow up on cases related to the invasion of the reserves.
- Promote regular meetings to share reports and activity plans between actors.
Based on these recommendations, the project is implementing bivalve aquaculture, prioritising women’s involvement to address opportunity costs. We are supporting annual district, provincial and national stakeholder meetings. We are supporting CCPs with equipment for improved LMMA enforcement. We are strengthening CCP skills for communication and equitable governance through training by AMA.
The purpose of this exercise needs to be well understood by the focus group members. It must exist a will to improve existing conditions by the focus groups members and they must recognise change is possible.
SAGE and IMET methodologies are the simplest, fastest, easiest and cheapest way to evaluate and monitor the progress of a project. Before adopting these tools, the project used only EXCEL to analyse the data, and this was time consuming and expensive as we needed to hire consultants to conduct the surveys. Data analysis and interpretation was also done manually, which too was time consuming.