SOFER Initiative

Fishing Net Gains West Africa (FNGWA)

The FNGWA is a 1 year fundament with continuous monitoring and evaluation that seeks to engage coastal fishing communities and marine stakeholders to address the issues of ghost gear in the West African region with a scalable and replicable solution. Proffering a solution that is beneficial to host communities is paramount to the FNGWA project and we have developed a self sustaining system that requires input and reward by coastal communities in our integrated programs.

1. Community Engagement and Integration.

2. Fishing HubNet (Kiosk that collects, process, and distribute data and end-of-life fishing gears).

3. Craft Development and Commerce from waste nets.

4. Dive For Data (DFD) (Ghost gear diving for recovery)

5.HubNet Location App

FNGWA is designed as a cyclic economy with robust individual sub-programs that can be adopted as it pertains to individual communities without engaging the entire community integrated cycle.

The solution addresses the ghost gear problem caused by Abandoned Lost or otherwise Discarded Fishing Gears.

Scale of the problem

70% of the weight of macroplastics in the ocean is fishing-related (GGGI https://bit.ly/3isVdac)

Abandoned, Lost or Discarded Fishing Gear or “Ghost Gear” Can Cause Wide-Ranging Problems For Marine Life, And Can Persist In The Environment For Up To 600 Years

Every year, 640,000 tonnes of ghost gear enters our oceans. That’s as heavy as two Empire State Buildings (GGGI https://bit.ly/3isVdac)

About 500 people from 3 different communities have been trained in crafts, employed as data collectors at the HubNets and as volunteer divers. 

We are also raising economic frontiers of coastal fishing communities by engaging in the process of retrieval, processing and disposal of waste nets. 

SOFER Initiative is integrating fishing communities through the FNGWA project to recover, treat and repurpose waste nets into gains through crafts and arts creation with commerce platforms to sustain the community cyclic economic system.

The target population comprise mostly of artisanal fishers including rural women who engage in small scale fish trade.

In what ways are they currently underserved?

Impact of middle-men: the middle-men in the fish trade short-change the fishers and the women who trade in fish such that they do not get the proper value for their labour. The ecommerce system will help these fishers bypass the middle-men thereby improving their revenue.

Waste collection facilities: these communities are not provided with waste collection facilities. This in turn promotes the deterioration of their environment which of course affects their overall wellbeing. My solution offers the HubNet as an innovative solution, that does not only collect waste, but equally serves as a collation, treatment, and analysis centre for the collected gears.

No access to financial facilities: Currently, the fishers do not have access to financial facilities they need to help cushion the effect of ghost fishing on their occupation. My solution includes helping the fishers set up a cooperative society from where they access soft loans or grants.

What are you doing to understand their needs?

Community Engagement: the community leaders are constantly engaged through meetings and other forms of discussion.

Community Stakeholder’s Workshop: this workshop provided a forum for the communities to express their views about the problem, and they also made their recommendations which formed part of the resolution of the workshop.

The solution is designed to first build a resilient people. A people lacking resilience get easily overwhelmed, and may turn to unhealthy environmental behaviours. The solution contains elements such as the proposed cooperative society, the HubNet Cyclic System, the ongoing Craft Development, Marketing and Sales, all of which are environmental management structures and processes that will help give the people the strength needed to process and overcome hardship. This will promote resilience in the communities which in turn translate to resilience for their aquatic environment.

The pilot project was implemented a year and 3 months ago in two coastal communities; Ibeno and Uta-Ewa, both in Akwa  Ibom State. Since then, we have scaled the solution to include two more coastal communities; Badagry in Lagos State, and Brass in Bayelsa State. We hope to scale the solution beyond the shores of Nigeria to include other West African countries such as Cameroon and Ghana before the end of March 2022. Number of persons involved in the craft and HubNet processes are;

• Ibeno: 247 persons
• Ikot Abasi: 105
• Badagry: 105
• Brass: 

The Fishing Net Gains Project is innovative in the following ways:

The Fishing HubNet: The Fishing HubNet is an innovative solution to indiscriminate dumping of fishing gear related waste.

HubNet Location Finder App: Provide solutions for finding a HubNet to discard ghost gears, report sightings of lost or abandoned gears, generate data to manage gear, fisheries and marine issues. 

Community Integration Centre: A place where communities can converge to educate women in craft making from waste gears, deliberate on incentives and a physical market for repurposed gears.

Directly:

Currently 500

The next year 1000

in five years 80000

There are baseline documents of the issue with information and statistics and see how the numbers change. Also the progress is measured through the number of people involved in the process, and also the income stream of the target demography. Conducting focus groups and public forums to obtain information about perceived issues and the progress made within the community is also ways to measure progress.

8 Full Time Staff

7 Volunteer Staff

12 Field Staff 

The full time staff of my organization were volunteers who have selflessly served the cause of environmental awareness and community support for over 5 years after meeting with me on my quest to go on the streets to change people’s perception positively  towards the environment. When we decided to operate full time as an organization, the most consistent volunteers rallied round to help set up our structure.

None of the team members are professionals in our field of work. I am a full time Air Traffic Controller, the Project Manager studied International Relations and History with no job experience, the HR Manager has a degree in English Language but currently studying Project Management and Human Resources, the Accountant is a software engineer with his own company, the R&D manager studying environmental management but never practiced until she started work with us. This also apply to present volunteer staff, they are from diverse educational backgrounds but given unique opportunities to showcase their knowledge and skills in what we do.

Our project is an integrated system and we engage with the communities during our needs analysis and get accepted with common interests to improve the livelihood of each community. My team recruits local community volunteers so as to fill the gap of between our organization and the communities. This strategy has worked for us tremendously.

As a team we all have basic operational responsibilities at the office but we are integrated in our solutions as well to take up field responsibilities.

We operate a non-biased yet inclusive team. We have an almost equal gender balance workforce and create equal opportunities for positions irrespective of gender, yet we are sensitive to responsibilities that could challenge the strength of our females.

We are open to working with people from all around the world and do not consider nationality, tribe or race for recruitment of our staff. We are more focused on how passionate someone is towards our cause and how much they are willing to commit to meet our set goals and targets.

Though we do not discuss sexuality at our place of work, we do not have any discriminatory policies or approach to preferences. We maintain an act of mutual respect during and after work.

We had a staff suggest that a position was not suitable for a volunteer because she was female but he was reprimanded immediately and warned never to judge someone’s capability because of their gender.

Expansion in our solution

Technological Solutions

International collaboration

Increased funding

Better training opportunities

etc

We intend to engage in every opportunity to learn and collaborate to improve livelihoods of coastal communities.

UNEP

IMO

FAO

Adidas

USAID

etc

We are engaged in resolving the issues of the highest pollutant of the ocean - ghost gears. We will increase our capacity to engage and empower coastal communities to recover ghost gears the cause entrapment of fishes in the ocean.