For small-scale fishing communities along South Africa’s 3,000km coastline, an app that’s been in use for the past seven years is becoming as important as hooks, lines and nets.
It has enabled these communities to bring their fresh catches to dinner tables, restaurants and hotels, eliminating the once ubiquitous langanas — the middlemen who would take their often generous cut. Now those doing the catching can negotiate directly with the marketplace and even with online buyers.
For decades, thousands of those small-scale fishing communities had no access to markets. This bothered Serge Raemaekers, a marine researcher at the University of Cape Town, who has been helping to bring hi-tech capability to those on the boats.
Raemaekers has long been passionate about fishing and the communities doing the catching. He had first-hand knowledge of the challenges, which ranged from coping with adverse weather to obtaining access to markets. In 2015 this led him and colleagues Nico Waldeck, also a fisherman and an activist, and Abongile Ngqongwa, an official in the fisheries department, to start a nonprofit organisation called Abalobi — a Xhosa word for a person who catches fish. Abalobi has provided the fishing communities with the tools and resources to get their catches sold, and at good prices.
“We’re about 50 staff members now,” Raemaekers says. “About half are from fisher communities. We support these small-scale fishers to enable them to transition to earning a legitimate and fair livelihood from catching, processing and selling ecologically resilient stocks.
People can even text the fishers who caught the fish, before they put it on the braai
“We do this through the technology we have designed and built that helps fishers log their catch, their expenses and their income on an app and use it as a daily accounting tool. When they apply for permits they can attach their logs to their application to prove they are bona fide local fishers. It’s basically a management-accounting tool. Many fishers use it — and it’s free.
The data captured in the app is used to ensure fair prices and provides information about sustainable fishing practices and regulations to protect marine resources. The app registers the catches and details about them. Along with providing this data to researchers, it identifies markets.
“We started off by working just with chefs in and around Cape Town. ‘Catch of the day’ — chefs love that. We now connect with restaurant chains, retailers and members of the public, enabling them to buy fresh fish,” says Raemaekers.
It’s a unique selling point: buying premium-quality, affordable local fish that is also fully traceable. The fish is sashimi-grade, which means it has been treated in a way that makes it safe to be eaten raw.
On every pack, with every order, there’s a QR code that indicates who caught the fish, what kind it is, and where, how and when it was caught. People can even text the fishers who caught the fish, before they put it on the braai.
“That’s the value proposition. It’s about reimagining our relationship with seafood and about buying from local small-scale fishing communities who practise low-impact fishing. At the same time, it collects a lot of data that can be very useful for the management of the resource.”
There are close to 500-million small-scale fishing communities across the world who are at the frontline of climate change, says Raemaekers. He tells the FM that supporting small-scale fishing communities enables them to adapt to those challenges, because they play a crucial role in sustainable fishing and ocean conservation. By empowering these communities, he says, they can become resilient.
“[This winter] there were very few days when fishers could go out to sea, so many families had a rough time. Many didn’t know where their food would come from. Now is the time to support them [by buying from them], and Abalobi marketplace is the way to do it,” Raemaekers says.
Abalobi, he says, helped the communities gain access to big chain restaurants and presented opportunities for partnerships with larger businesses. “We’ve partnered with South African restaurant chains like Ocean Basket, some retailers and distributors, locally and in other parts of the world. We’ve grown phenomenally, especially in the past year, on the back of being a finalist in the 2023 global environmental Earthshot contest.”
Many of those employed by Abalobi are former fishermen and fisherwomen who live in the fishing communities and know what is happening at sea, says Raemaekers. The technology is being shared with partner groups in other countries, among them Chile, Ireland and Croatia.
There are plans to expand in Africa too, from Mozambique to Tanzania, Kenya and even the Seychelles and Madagascar. The app is being adapted for the thousands of local fishing communities along the coast.
Lake Victoria, which is shared by Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, is also in Abalobi’s sights. It is the world’s largest tropical lake and the world’s second-largest freshwater lake by surface area after Lake Superior in the US.
*Additional reporting by Archie Henderson
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