ADF STAFF
Enraged that foreign trawlers continuously deprive them of food and income, artisanal fishermen in Ghana are using a new smartphone app to detect and report illegal fishing.
More than 100 fishermen in Ghana are using the app called Dase, meaning “evidence” in Fante, a Ghanaian dialect. It was recently developed by the Environmental Justice Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that works to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in West Africa.
Fisheries are vitally important to Ghana, where more than 100,000 fishermen and 11,000 canoes operate, according to Steve Trent, executive director of the foundation. The app is also being developed for use in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Ghana’s “marine fisheries support the livelihoods of over 2.7 million people — almost 10% of the population — and more than 200 coastal villages depend on fisheries as their primary source of income,” Trent told ADF in an email. “However, fish populations are in steep decline, driven, in large part, by widespread illegal fishing by Chinese-owned industrial trawlers.”
When a trawler is suspected of illegal fishing, an artisanal fisherman can open the app and photograph the vessel — including its name or identification number — to record the location. The app uploads the report to a central database that authorities can use to catch and penalize perpetrators.
Experts say illegal fishing could completely decimate Ghana’s small pelagic fish populations, such as sardinella, which has dropped 80% in the past two decades, according to the foundation. Pelagic fish live near the water’s surface.
“These vessels fish close to shore, in the zone reserved for small-scale fishers, and use prohibited methods to target fish species that should rather be caught by local fishing communities, such as the severely depleted sardinella,” Trent said.
The app “means canoe fishers no longer have to stand by while industrial vessels fish illegally in their fishing grounds,” Nana Jojo Solomon, executive member of the Ghana National Canoe Fishermen Council, said in a report by The Guardian.
“Our approach is to establish direct contacts with fishers through traditional authorities (Chief fishermen) at the landing beaches, fisheries extension officers and our local staff based in the communities,” Trent said. “We have found that establishing trust and delivering ongoing capacity building to fishers to engage in monitoring is the most effective way of ensuring [that] robust and actionable information is collected over time.”
Over the past 15 years, Ghanaian fishermen have experienced a 40% drop in average annual income per artisanal canoe, according to the foundation. Contributing to the decline is the practice of saiko, the illegal transshipment of fish at sea.
In 2017, saiko took 100,000 tons of fish from Ghanaian waters, costing the country millions of dollars in revenue and threatening food security and jobs, the foundation said. That year, industrial trawlers caught almost the same amount of fish as the local fishing sector when illegal and unreported catches were taken into account, according to a report by the foundation and Hen Mpoano, a nongovernmental organization.
Frederick Bortey is one of many Ghanaian fishermen who want the government to ban illegal industrial trawlers.
“My children are not getting money to go to school,” Bortey told Voice of America. “So it is very painful that we are talking about it. They can try and sack those people for us. We would like that, so we can fish, too, in our own country.”