ABALOBI

Small-scale fishers globally are considered data-poor, due to a lack of access to adequate supporting technologies, training, and infrastructure. The result is continued marginalisation in the development, market, management, and governance spheres. Further, women in particular remain amongst the most marginalised in the fishery.

We work with small-scale fishers and communities to co-design and develop a suite of interconnected mobile applications that give fishers free access to digital catch and expense logging, a digital seafood marketplace connecting them directly to consumers, and pair these tools with training and capacity building, enhanced cold chains, a logistics system, payment gateway and market support, alongside organisational development assistance to create robust, resilient and digitally literate empowered fisher communities.   

Our programmes and platforms result in tangible improvements in market access and visibility, community wellbeing, nutrition, livelihood security, public and governance participation, as well as fishers' ability to engage in management and other spheres. 

Small-scale fisheries around the world contribute an estimated 60% of global catch. These mostly informal fisheries are also incredibly labour intensive, providing jobs to 60 million people (the equivalent of 90% of people involved in all fisheries worldwide) and a further 160 million jobs to those involved in ancillary activities. Yet, whilst 10-12% of the global population rely on fish for their livelihoods, an estimated 5.8 million fishers in the world earn less than 1 USD per day, and despite their contribution to food security, only 30% of wild capture fisheries are quantitatively assessed (representing less than 20% of total number of species caught).

This speaks to the overall paucity of data in small-scale fisheries. This paucity and lack of a digital identity means fishers are unable to prove their livelihoods (meaning access to loans and financial instruments is almost impossible), cannot participate in management and governance conversations and remain price takers in the market. As data-poor citizens, their ability to improve their prospects are severely limited.

ABALOBI puts fishers first. We work with fishers to co-design a suite of ICTs and interventions, paired with tailored training and capacity building programmes, that support their digital inclusion, participation and visibility. 

The ABALOBI Fisher app is the foundation of our programme, offering fishers a free, contextually adapted app enabling catch and expense logging, accurate forecasting and sea state conditions for decision making, a repository for all important documents, and access to simple data visualisations and analytics at the tap of a button. It's the first step in creating a digital identity. 

The ABALOBI Marketplace platform builds on the Fisher app, enabling participating fishers to place fresh catch of the day for sale directly to consumers. This platform is paired with a robust traceability and logistics system, ensuring fresh deliveries and shortened, transparent supply chains. Where small-scale fishers traditionally struggle to secure payments in conventional supply chains, participating ABALOBI fishers have access to rapid payment gateways. 

These tools are underpinned by a comprehensive training and capacity building programme run by our in house community development team. This ensures fishers are equipped with the knowledge and skills to engage meaningfully with the technology and participate in the fourth industrial revolution.  

We work exclusively with small-scale fishers across Southern Africa, South America, the Mediterranean, and the Western Indian Ocean region. Small-scale fisheries around the world are characterised by low-tech fishing methods, limited access to supporting infrastructure and technologies, and data paucity. As such, they are considered data-poor and highly marginalised in markets, development and governance. Low literacy is also extremely common in small-scale fishing communities, and women in particular are amongst the most marginalised groups within the fisheries, often being underpaid for their work, and not formally recognised in management and governance structures. 

We work with fishers from the ground up, placing emphasis on co-design methodology to truly understand the most pressing needs and challenges facing fishers, and working with them to design technological solutions that address these in meaningful, accessible ways. 

Our solutions, in the form of community development and training, collective action and organisational development support, catch logging and market access, address the most critical challenges small-scale fishers face. Our programmes directly target women in fisheries to ensure their equitable remuneration and recognition. 

The co-design focus of our programmes and platforms also means that all of our solutions are fit for purpose, readily adopted, and make a difference in fishers' and communities' lives from the outset. Further, the continuous iterative nature of our approach ensures that we are able to constantly refine and update our approach and offering, and adapt it according to different contextual needs and challenges.  

Small-scale fishers are amongst the most digitally marginalised groups globally. Considered data-poor, due to a lack of access to infrastructure and supporting technologies, and often operating in rural contexts where access to ICTs tools and training is severely limited, this large cohort, and major contributor to global food and nutritional security remains largely without a digital identity, critical data in support of their livelihood, and consequently, excluded from markets, development and management agendas. 

We offer fishers free catch logging, expense tracking, data visualisations, markets, fair prices, training and financial products, and the generation of individual digital identities and data ownership. 

We have well-established sites in nine communities in South Africa, and a pilot underway in the Seychelles. Additionally, we are poised to trial our Software as a Service (SaaS) package to proof of concept partners in Chile, Ireland and France in the latter half of 2021. As such, whilst we have several established sites and proof of concept pilots coming online, we are still refining our offering and platforms and consider ourselves to be in an advanced growth phase. 

ABALOBI's approach is truly ground up. We work with fishers to co-design solutions to their greatest challenges. The result is a broad span of topics including product traceability, cold chain, market access, catch logging, financial access, or training in financial literacy. 

Our focus is on building and empowering fisher and community collectives that take ownership of their enterprises, whilst creating the market share, visibility, and demand to foster sustainable and lasting demand for their products. Rather than a conventional top-down approach then, our goal is to contribute to thriving fisher communities that, if we do our job correctly, don't need us down the line.  

Our impact is truly catalytic - empowered communities are able to replicate the model, spreading their knowledge and expertise to others. We start this journey by training community-based coaches, so that knowledge and expertise becomes embedded in the community, rather than being provided by outsiders. 

The co-designed nature of our solutions mean they're adapted to local conditions, readily adopted by users, and ultimately address their most pressing challenges. Rather than a single standalone product or service at one point in the fishery value chain, our offering has evolved over time as fishers inform us of their biggest needs and hurdles, and spans the entire seafood value chain. Our app suite is highly integrated, with all of our ICTs deeply linked, providing fishers with a powerful suite of data collection and representation methods that address all aspects of their fishery, from "hook to cook". 

Current: 788 fishers supporting ~3000 dependents (family and ancillary fish workers)

One year: 2 000 fishers supporting ~10 000 dependents (family and ancillary fish workers)

Five years: 20 000 fishers supporting ~100 000 dependents (family and ancillary fish workers)

Monitoring and evaluation are central to our model. We track and report on a large suite of indicators across our projects, programmes and projects, as well as across our partner sites and pilot deployments in real-time, utilising the SoPact ImpactCloud Monitoring & Evaluation platform.  Impact tracking is integrated at a high level across our apps, and we run digital baseline, midline and longitudinal surveys with all participating fishers, whether they join the MARKETPLACE platform or not. 

Examples of additional indicators include: 

• Number of fishers participating in ABALOBI co-design meetings
• Number of fishers participating in ABALOBI scoping/RVA workshops
• Number of collective structures formed & formalised (2 different things)
• Income growth
• Percentage of targeted individuals/households reporting missed meals
• Number of Abalobi members referring/registering other fishers
• Number of ABALOBI users participating in policy workshops and meetings
• Economic value retention
• Proportion of catch rated per seafood consumer guide ecological sustainibility status
• Progress against social indicators (as recorded on fisheryprogress.org)
• Progress against environmental indicators (as recorded on fisheryprogress.org)
• Progress against financial indicators (as recorded on fisheryprogress.org)
• Number of fishers verified, and completed their profile (role, permits etc)
• Proportion of Abalobi fishermen living in households with access to basic services
• Proportion of Abalobi fisherwomen living in households with access to basic services
• Proportion of Abalobi fishermen reporting a change in their level of self-awareness, self-worth and confidence
• Proportion of Abalobi fisherwomen reporting a change in their level of self-awareness, self-worth and confidence
• Proportion of Abalobi fishermen accessing financial services
• Proportion of Abalobi fisherwomen accessing financial services

Full-time: 20

Contractors and other workers: 12

The core ABALOBI team comprises experts in small-scale fisheries governance, ICTs and tech for development contexts, community development, co-design, and startup finance.

Key to our team is the fact that whilst core members' expertise sometimes overlaps, we all bring a wide range of perspectives and specialisations to the table. 

An important component of this mix of skills is the co-founders' experience working in small-scale fisheries. Co-founder Nico Waldeck is a retired small-scale fisher and has been deeply involved in community development for 25 years, whilst co-founder Serge Raemaekers comes from an academic fisheries science perspective, grounded in tech. This combination of different perspectives and expertise focused on the same theme is common across our teams, and enables us to better understand the nuances and challenges that arise at the intersection of rural community development and technology development. 

A further critical component of our team structure is our embedded field staff. Within this model, we identify and train up community members who are associated with fishers and/or fishing, and empower them to conduct training, tech deployment and support, and data and feedback gathering. In this way, we have overcome a typical "top-down" approach, by embedding capacity within the communities, and generating knowledge sharing from within. This approach further fosters community support and buy-in for our programme. 

Being a South African-based organisation, diversity is a priority at all levels. From our Board to our founding team, to all other teams within ABALOBI, we place great emphasis on hiring, training and supporting a diverse workforce. This starts in the community, with gender equality being brought into focus. We work with women in fisher communities, training them in cold chain, quality control, fisheries monitoring, and value-added product creation. These women are then hired to fulfill various roles in the value chain and serve as key role players in our operations. As an example, the quality control teams are currently 94% female staffed, and the MARKETPLACE platform hosts a dedicated "Pantry" selection of value-added products produced by women's cooperatives. All of our community liaisons and leads are people from the communities we serve, and our office-based staff demographics exceed the South African government's Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment regulations. 

Our biggest drawcard to the Solve challenge is to expand our professional network. Given MIT's reputation and advanced networks, and our relative isolation as a South African based organisation that is pioneering small-scale fisheries ICT access globally, we are eager to connect with experts on a global scale. Specifically, we are interested in both professional expertise linked to ICTs, small-scale fisheries, and market access for small-scale producers, as well as potential mentors and partner organisations that can drive the testing and refinement of our model and technology. 

As we expand, we face the challenge of sourcing the level of expertise and experience required to appropriately support the communities with which we work. Specifically, we are looking to employ individuals with a high level of technical expertise in both app development, and market development. 

Tied to this, as we evolve and grow, we increasingly require tech mentors who can guide us based on previous experience in similar small-scale market access contexts. 

Lastly, as an organisation based in the global South, but with the intention of expanding globally, we seek the opportunity to expand our networks, form new partnerships and expand our client base.  

TruTrade - we would be interested to learn from their scaling experience in empowering small-scale farmers in Africa.

Destácame - we have been exploring various options for small-scale fishers to access financial and insurance products in support of their livelihood, and would like to learn from their experience. 

Peripheral Vision International - we have been developing our e-learning suite for fishers, enabling them to learn in the context of COVID-19 lockdowns, where in-person training is not possible. We would like to learn from PVI's experience in developing contextually relevant educational materials. 

Our solutions specifically advance an inclusivity agenda based on improving small-scale fishers' and fishing communities' digital literacy and access to supporting digital technologies. In turn, our programmes and platforms offer participants the opportunity to enhance their livelihood security and income, spreading economic opportunity into communities that have traditionally been severely economically disenfranchised and marginalised. 

The prize money will be spent on enhancing our digital literacy offering, translating our Whatsapp educational bot into more languages, and developing further educational materials and capacity in our community development team. 

Our programme specifically offers training and empowerment opportunities, job creation and fair remuneration for women in small-scale fisheries. Typically, women are amongst the most marginalised participants in the sector, despite significant contributions to harvesting, cleaning, processing, distributing, and selling. 

The prize money will be used to enhance our women's learnership programme, which teaches women from fishing communities how to improve their cold chain and quality control operations, form successful women's cooperatives, attain fair remuneration for their contributions, and create, market and sell their own value-added seafood products on the ABALOBI MARKETPLACE platform and beyond. 

Our approach is driven by a deep understanding of each of the communities we work in. It is this contextual knowledge that allows us to develop adaptable, highly configurable platforms that address fishers' biggest challenges from the ground up. Traceability is a major component of our value proposition for both producers and consumers, and will be greatly enhanced through the use of blockchain technology, which we see as a future, necessary development in the evolution of our traceability platform, but one which we currently lack the funding to explore. As such we will use the prize to advance our traceability platform across the entire value chain from fisher to consumer.