Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme (SFLP) in West Africa

The Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme (SFLP) represents a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Department for International Development of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (DFID) and the 25 participating, developing countries of Western Africa. The participating countries are Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.

The SFL Programme, which began in October 1999 for a seven-year period, is operational with Project Coordination Unit in FAO headquarters Rome and its Regional Support Unit in Cotonou, Benin. Each of the 25 participating countries have set up a National Coordinating Unit with representatives of government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and fish-producer organizations.

Helping poor fishing communities

Marine and inland fisheries resources are the main source of livelihood for over five million people in West and Central African countries, and represent up to two thirds of the animal protein content of the average diet throughout the whole region, playing a very crucial role in national and local food security. However, there is widespread recognition and broad evidence that fishing communities are among the poorest in most of these countries.

On the other hand, the fishing resources accessible to artisanal fisherfolks have been declining over the last decade, due to excessive and illegal exploitation by industrial vessels and increasing pressure of exploitation in many artisanal fisheries. The continuous and transboundary characteristic of the marine fisheries and the cross-cutting issues of coastal surveillance and sustainable management of both marine and inland resources, all require a regional approach if any substantial long-term improvement is to be achieved.

In this context, the Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme seeks to reduce poverty by improving policy relating to artisanal fishing communities. In this regard, the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF) and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) provide respectively guidance for good practice in fisheries resource use, and a framework for using grass-roots procedures to influence policy issues, institutional environments and processes.

The application of both SLA and CCRF and the focus on human and social capital development, in particular by building capacities and strengthening national institutions and community-bBased organizations (CBOs), rather than prescribing technical fixes or concentrating on production methods, are proving positive achievements at different levels. The Programme is now aiming at connecting these changes with the wider processes of livelihoods improvement and poverty alleviation, which require involving both sustainable management of the resource and economic opportunity development.

Practical approach

In practical terms SFLP puts the approach into practice through community projects, institutional strengthening and pilot projects.

SFLP has an expanding number of small community projects identified by stakeholders themselves. These projects are considered as "seeds" to interest both government and the public to interact in a new and dynamic way. They implement the aspirations of the communities themselves whilst providing excellent lessons learnt to government services and international agencies in how to practically resolve poverty issues.

The Programme is now attempting to put together the whole framework of sustainable livelihood by engaging three sets, each of four countries, in pilot projects: comanagement in inland waters (Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali); co-management in coastal fisheries livelihoods (Congo, Gabon, Guinea, Mauritania) and post-harvest fisheries livelihoods (Cameroon, Chad, The Gambia, Senegal).

Partnerships at all levels

In implementing these projects, SFLP is engaged in the majority of the countries with international, regional and local NGOs.  By employing their social, organizational skills and services it aims to promote better collaboration between private and public sectors in order to undertake a range of tasks more efficiently whilst obtaining a diffusion of approaches on a wider scale.  Such engagement has usually been the result of a request to do so from the national fisheries service who realise that alone they sometimes have difficulty to encompass the holistic principle of SLA.

Another important area of work being undertaken in collaboration with local staff and consultants is poverty profiling, in order to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics and dimensions of poverty.  It is no longer adequate to consider that poverty responds only to economic reform but social reform is also needed.  The profiling looks equally at qualitative and quantitative aspects. 

The Programme has had a significant impact at national government level in a number of countries in raising the initial awareness of the level of poverty in the artisanal fishing communities and ensuring the inclusion of the artisanal fisheries sector into Poverty Reduction Strategy processes. In the medium and long term, this achievement will be highly significant in focusing attention and channelling additional development funds to artisanal fishing communities.

Development partnerships at all levels, from local CBOs with national and international NGOs, to wider agreements with bilateral and multilateral donors are a critical need to reduce poverty in its various dimensions. SFLP is therefore establishing strategic partnerships, e.g. with IFAD, AfDB, EU, and inform other development agencies on best practices. It offer new perspectives on social, technical, institutional and policy interventions in the relatively complex areas of natural-resource linked poverty alleviation.

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