Improved fisheries data handling for sustainable fisheries management in East Africa

The Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, Germany, and its partners – the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute (TAFIRI), the Institute of Marine Science in Zanzibar, and the  Institute of Fisheries Research in Mozambique – recently hosted a stakeholders and project kick-off workshop for the new project, FIDEA – Fishing Data East Africa.

The FIDEA is a two-year project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and coordinated under the MeerWissen initiative in cooperation with WIOMSA. The objective is to improve fisheries data collection and management systems by project partners to support the management of artisanal fisheries and contribute to the countries’ commitments to report on the progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 14.4.

From 16 to 17 September 2019, TAFIRI hosted the kickoff workshop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The workshop was attended by 34 participants from five countries, including representatives from WIOMSA and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) – including representatives from FAO’s marine and inland fisheries branch and the statistics and information branch. It provided a forum for reviewing and discussing the current status of fisheries data and statistics in the region, and the state of submission of fisheries data to FAO’s global statistics database. Further, the application of digital tools for improving the collection of fisheries data was comprehensively discussed, including the strategies to be adopted by the countries of the region to move ahead with reporting on SDG target 14.4, in line with the United Nations standards.