ADF

ADF STAFF As Mozambique’s neighbors in Southern Africa join its four-year fight against insurgents in the Cabo Delgado region, observers are celebrating early gains while warning of the potential for a prolonged and costly engagement. Under the auspices of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), Botswana, Rwanda, South Africa and others dispatched troops to bolster Mozambique’s response to the Islamic insurgency, known locally al-Shabab. In recent years, attacks by extremists have killed 3,000 people and driven up to 800,000 from their homes. Rwanda, which is not part of SADC, was the first nation to deploy troops to the region. In…

ADF STAFF The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) and a fisheries intelligence analysis company have joined forces with Senegal’s government on a new program focused on promoting transparency among the nation’s fisheries and ridding the country of illegal fishing. Funded by Oceans 5, a philanthropic organization dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans, the nearly $1.2 million, three-year project with EJF and Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT) aims to publish up-to-date fishing license lists and vessel registries online. It will also empower artisanal fishermen to play a role in surveillance and monitoring efforts at the port of Dakar, as well as the government’s…

ADF STAFF Australia’s national science agency and Microsoft have joined forces to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the technology company are linking artificial and human intelligence by using robotic underwater cameras and sound-detecting technology known as hydrophones to alert authorities of suspicious sea activity around Indonesia and the Great Barrier Reef. The high-resolution cameras can capture a vessel’s type and features, where it has traveled, the direction in which it is moving and how fast. Hydrophones can record sounds from vessel engines, air compressors and winches, and explosives used…

ADF STAFF The threat of piracy across the Gulf of Guinea has caused shipping companies to call on South African boat builder Paramount Maritime for help. The company manufactures specially made vessels to protect ships that transit hazardous water like the Gulf, which is the world’s hot spot for kidnappings. Based in Cape Town, Paramount Maritime has grown rapidly in recent years. The company, which made 60 vessels between 2004 and 2019, has nearly half that on order. “We pioneered the security patrol market in West Africa,” Stuart McVitty, chief executive officer of Paramount Maritime, told Bloomberg. “We’ve seen steady…

ADF STAFF Along the coastline of East Africa, piracy, trafficking and illegal fishing are ever-present threats. Aiming to improve regional security, the maritime forces of 11 East African nations joined the U.S. Navy for Exercise Cutlass Express. Hosted by Kenya, the event featured training in ports and in waters near Djibouti, Kenya, Madagascar and the Seychelles from July 26 to August 6. “The Western Indian Ocean has been rife with many maritime challenges for a prolonged period of time due to the porous vast sea area,” Brig. Thomas Nganga, commander of Kenya’s Mtongwe Naval Base, said during the opening ceremony…

ADF STAFF When South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma turned himself in to police July 7 to serve a 15-month jail sentence, hundreds of his supporters were gathered near his home in the KwaZulu-Natal province, some armed with guns, spears and shields. What had been a long legal drama that ended with Zuma being found guilty of contempt of court quickly turned into violence, which tested the country’s ability to enforce law and order. Nine days of South Africa’s worst civil unrest since the end of apartheid in 1994 has experts saying the violence exposed weaknesses in the country’s security…

ADF STAFF The water level behind the Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam (GERD) rose again in July, and tensions between Ethiopia and its downstream neighbors rose along with it. Ethiopia announced on July 20 that it had completed the second filling of the massive hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile just south of the border with Sudan. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed made the announcement, adding that the filling “will not harm downstream countries.” Ahmed’s statement did little to appease Sudan and Egypt, who see the Ethiopian project as a threat to their access to freshwater. “What Ethiopia is doing is an…

ADF STAFF A new contest is calling on coders to take on illegal fishing. The U.S. Department of Defense and nongovernmental organization Global Fishing Watch recently launched the xView3 AI contest for software engineers who can use artificial intelligence (AI) to help track vessels engaged in illegal fishing. The winners must be able to follow fishing vessels that turn off their automatic identification systems (AIS) to avoid authorities — a practice known as “going dark”— by using space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The technology can detect radar-reflective objects, such as industrial fishing trawlers, on the seas regardless of heavy clouds…

ADF STAFF The island nation of Seychelles became the world’s first country to issue a report on the management of its fisheries sector through the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI) in April. Established in 2017, FiTI aims to collect and make public reliable data related to fishing. This includes the number of vessels licensed to fish in a particular country’s waters, catch data, information about the sustainability of fish stocks, and the economic value from various forms of fishing and fish processing, and more. Throughout Africa and beyond, maritime experts have long called for greater transparency among fisheries sectors to discourage…

ADF STAFF U.S. military trainers recently certified a dozen members of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) and Kenyan Rapid Response Unit (RRU) as specialists in survival, evasion, resistance and escape (SERE) skills. The 12-week course was conducted in conjunction with the arrival of a C-145A Skytruck cargo plane earlier this year. Kenya is the first country in Africa to add a Skytruck to support its capacity for rapid response, aerial patrols and military intervention. The training expanded the KDF’s team of SERE instructors. “The training has helped build the confidence in operating in difficult conditions and has come in handy…