Organisations representing European and African fisheries stakeholders have adopted a joint advice, which was sent to both the African Union and the European Union, looking at how EU policies, in particular Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships Agreements (SFPAs) signed between the EU and African countries, could be better used to promote women’s activities in the African fisheries sector.
The AFRIFISH-Net, representing African Fisheries Non-State Actors, together with the EU Long Distance Fisheries Advisory Council (LDAC), started last year a dialogue and collaboration so that “young European and African men and women in the fisheries sector might find a sustainable livelihood contributing to fixing population, promoting career development, contributing to resilience to climate change, and to the preservation of local values and communities”. Both AFRIFISH-Net and LDAC also supported the Artisanal Fishers Call to Action launched in 2022 which emphasized, as a priority, the need to guarantee the participation of women in fisheries and support their role in innovation.
The adopted advice notes that, given the combined issue of over-exploitation of some species like small pelagics, and the impact of climate change that alters the availability and distribution of these stocks, women have less fish to process and sell. It therefore calls on the EU to strive to improve women’s access to raw fish material for processing and/or selling, through: (1) increasing its efforts to promote the sustainable regional management of small pelagics in North West Africa; (2) encouraging the use of these resources for human consumption, rather than fishmeal and fish oil, and (3) ensuring all vessels of EU origin do not contribute to the over-exploitation of these small pelagic resources.
In line with the fishers Call to Action, it further calls the EU, through SFPAs sectoral support and parnerships policy, to “support investments in innovative processing and marketing techniques (improved smoking ovens, solar powered cold storage, etc.) and the development of small-scale fish farming to complement women´s raw material supply”.
On this issue, responding to an earlier advice on the topic, the European Commission had replied that “Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements can make a great contribution supporting the processing capacity”, taking as an example, the sectoral support of the SFPA protocol signed with Guinea-Bissau, that has allowed to refurbish a fish-salting plant (salt-and-dry) managed by a women’s cooperative in the municipality of Buba (centre-east of the country).
The AFRIFISH-Net and the LDAC insist that the EU should also support women’s efforts to actively engage in decision-making processes, including for fisheries management decisions like the allocation of access to foreign fleets. A first step towards achieving this would be to systematically include women’s groups in the consultations for SFPAs ex-ante and ex-post evaluations, and give due consideration, in these evaluations, “to any potential impact on women in fishing communities”.
Banner photo: Two women fish processors during the celebrations of World Fisheries Day in November 2023 in Benin. Photo by CFFA.
West Africa has pioneered several decades of artisanal fisheries management reform. Yet there are still major obstacles to co-management: a lack of political will reflected in low budgetary allocations; inadequate and poorly targeted support for fisher organizations; poorly defined roles and responsibilities of fishers in co-management; lack of enforcement of inshore exclusive zones; and inadequate defense of human rights and particularly the important role of women.