Digital access for small-scale fisheries improvement

Small-scale fisheries contribute an estimated 60% of global seafood 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). Women, in particular, remain amongst the most marginalised in the sector, despite their significant contributions.

The majority of small-scale fisheries worldwide continue to be characterised by a lack of data, formalisation, market access, and longstanding marginalisation in both management fora and markets. 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 is a ground-up, fisher-driven organisation. 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.  

In addition to these solutions, we offer a broad suite of bundled financial services, a sector which fishers are typically unable to access. The suite includes savings, business cash advances, worker injury compensation, and a nascent group life insurance programme. 

We support fisher communities in the establishment and development of formalised fisher groups, providing organisational development guidance and fostering tangible collaborative relationships between fisher communities, and government, such as our ongoing training of South African fisheries department mentors and data collectors.  

We work exclusively with small-scale fishers across 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.  

The hallmark of the ABALOBI model is our fisher-driven approach. Rather than acting as a traditional NGO that travels to the communities it serves, we are embedded in the communities we serve; nearly 70% of our staff, across co-founders, team leads, to junior staff, are from fisher communities, and continue to reside in their home communities. This deeply embedded structure provides us with an unparalleled level of insight, rapport, and trust. 

The embedded structure has also been one of our biggest drivers of success; during COVID-19 lockdowns in South Africa, for example, despite experiencing extremely challenging times, the ABALOBI team was able to continue our work, due to our dispersed model with support staff living in the communities. Where many fisheries NGOs around the world were forced to wait to continue community engagements during this time, ABALOBI grew from strength to strength, learning in real-time what the most pressing challenges were, and creating programmes to address these as needed, such as our community food security programme, which has now grown into one of our most significant seafood market channels, directly channeling tens of tonnes of high-quality, affordable seafood annually into the communities that need it the most. 

ABALOBI was launched in mid-2018, and our fisher-driven model, combining digital inclusion technologies with training and capacity-building, has been trialed in 12 countries around the world. We are currently in a phase of deeply interrogating and analysing the data collected from these pilot deployments to better understand the levers of success that will enable us to grow and ultimately scale our model in the next 3-5 years. We have a well-established donor base with two key long-term funders in the form of Happel Foundation, and Cartier Foundation for Nature, with other notable current funders including UNDP, ORRAA, and Conservation International Ventures. 

We have been fortunate to be nominated as a finalist in the Earthshot competition 2023, and forged strong working partnerships with organisations including Wildlife Conservation Society, Blue Ventures, WWF, and Standford Centre for Ocean Solutions. 

All of these partners and funders, and the experiences we have gained from our South African and international pilot deployments have primed us for future scale and are driving our current sustained growth trend, strongly reflected in our impact data statistics, presented publicly at www.abalobi.org/impact

We have been fortunate to establish a broad range of fantastic working relationships, partners, and funders in the past five years. However, as we poise ourselves for scale, we are increasingly seeking access to new networks and ways of thinking. As a South African organisation, we sometimes feel geographically isolated from the drivers of global change, and wish to be more connected to international networks of excellence and best practice. 

We are therefore applying for assistance accessing the following expertise: AI (our ICT suite is primed to leverage AI interfaces, backend data processing, and more); insurance and financial services (as we look to scale our bundled financial services, refine the products, create new ones, and ensure they are scalable and applicable across widely varying international contexts); scaling expertise (we are in the process of consolidating and analysing data gathered in our multiple international and regional deployments, and would like to leverage this data to poise us for global scaling); international market contacts (we are piloting international exports of small-scale fishers' catch to the USA, and are seeking new partners to run similar pilots around the world). 

Small-scale fisheries are incredibly complex and the challenges facing each community can differ wildly; two small-scale fishing communities just 10km from one another often use different fishing methods, have completely different ocean access, infrastructure, and even target species. For this reason, ABALOBI has been formulated as a holistic approach; rather than tackling the challenges facing small-scale fisheries discretely, we see them as interconnected, and structure our programmes and engagements as such. 

Further to this, our unique combination of technologies and training are structured to be dynamic and adaptable to circumstances on the ground. We pair this with extensive scoping methods before deploying into a new community, ensuring that we have gathered a wealth of data, established lasting working relationships with community members, and underpin all of this with a co-design approach which sees all of our platforms and services tailored to the unique needs of the end-users. 

ABALOBI's Theory of Change is to develop thriving, equitable, climate change resilient and sustainable small-scale fishing communities, through inclusion, social entrepreneurship and a data-driven approach to fisheries rebuilding.

In South Africa, we support data collection and skills-building with fisher communities. We are also a fisher-led intermediary and incubator of the Fish With A Story marketplace platform co-operative.

Globally, our data, traceability and market technologies and programmes poise small-scale fishers for social, economic and ecological sustainability. We believe in participatory fisheries rebuilding strategies that consider ocean life and livelihoods.

We operate a robust and transparent Impact Measurement & Management (IMM) system based on our ToC and a Macro Logframe, tracking nearly 200 individual impact indicators (many of which are internationally standardised and based on established best practise) across triple-bottom-line social, ecological, and financial spheres. Each indicator is linked to an element of our Macro Logframe, tracking inputs, activities, assumptions, outputs, and outcomes at the medium, intermediate, and long-term time scales. More information on our IMM system, and public-facing impact indicator dashboards (updated in real-time) are available at www.abalobi.org/impact

Through access to ICTs, fishers foster a digital identity and become repositioned as data owners with verified catch records and income. 

Through a formal digital identity, fishers become poised to access financial products that they would ordinarily have been unable to access due to prior informal status and data paucity. 

Through market access via the ABALOBI Marketplace digital seafood market platform, fishers sell fresh catch of the day to end consumers, significantly improving their income, and financial resilience. 

Through extensive individual and community-level training, fishers are primed to engage with ICTs, management, and the market on an equal footing. 

Through assistance with organisational development, fishers are repositioned in management fora as data owners with viable input and a voice to share.

Through fair pay via ABALOBI, fishers receive a stable income, cut out predatory middle-persons, escape cycles of debt, and become financially independent. 

Through triple-bottom-line fisheries rebuilding, small-scale fishers take ownership of their resources, become stewards of their future livelihoods, and participate actively in global dialogues around traceability, sustainability, and the value of local ecological knowledge (LEK) in fisheries rebuilding and improvement for sustainable growth and resilience. 

As above, ABALOBI's intended impacts are thriving, equitable, climate change resilient, and sustainable small-scale fishing communities worldwide.

 We will achieve these impacts through a model of inclusion, social entrepreneurship, and a data-driven approach to fisheries rebuilding.

We track our impact via our bespoke IMM system, reporting live on nearly 200 indicators linked to our ToC and logframe at www.abalobi.org/impact

Our impact indicator metrics are tracked via a) TalentLMS e-learning system; b) digital engagement reports tracking participation linked to unique individual ABALOBI IDs; c) a longitudinal-type survey suite deployed when a fisher first registers, when they are about to join the Marketplace platform, and every successive year thereafter; d) via our Lobi Whatsapp chatbot; e) through our suite of ICTs including the ABALOBI Fisher (data and catch logging) app, Marketplace platform (direct to consumer sales), Monitor app (aggregated anonymous third party fisheries data collection tool); f) vessel monitoring system (VMS) boat tracking hardware; g) a range of other digital platforms linked to logistics, payment, traceability, finance, sales, and financial services

The primarily utilise a suite of in-house mobile applications that we co-design with fishers. These include the ABALOBI Fisher app, ABALOBI Marketplace platform, and ABALOBI monitor. 

Fisher app is our flagship fisher-driven interactive mobile app. Freely available to any small-scale fisher, it serves as a data capture portal for important catch and expense logging, as well as offering access to realtime forecasting and sea-state imaging, data visualisations, and the ability to upload important fishing-related documentation such permits. 

Marketplace is a digital seafood market platform facilitating sales from fishers direct to consumers, facilitated by the ABALOBI cold chain and logistics systems. 

Monitor app is a mobile platform enabling anonymous, aggregate catch data collection by third parties or fisher cooperatives at a landing site, community, or fishery level. 

These platforms are supported by other ICTs including payment systems, an e-learning platform where all of our courses and supporting materials are nested, digital survey platform (KoBo Toolbox), and digital logistics systems. 

With the ABALOBI ICTs successfully piloted in 12 countries, we have refined our app suite and capacity-building methodology, and are confident in their functionality. 

Our model has been independently reviewed by the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and the Stanford Centre for Ocean Solutions. 

Research papers are forthcoming, with two currently in development and one under review. We are able to share advanced copies of the manuscripts upon request, but prefer now to upload them to the platform as they are not yet published for public circulation. 

Full-time staff 45

Part-time and contractors 40

8 years

We pride ourselves on being an open and diverse organisation that is first and foremost, fisher-driven in our organisational makeup. With significant majority of our staff are from impoverished small-scale fishing communities and we hire specifically with an equity and diversity approach. Pursuant to our dedication to catalyse fisheries rebuilding and the fair remuneration and recognition of women's roles in small-scale fisheries, we focus our hiring on women and youth, with our staff now comprising 60% women, 76% of whom are from fisher communities. Detailed information on our team is available HERE 

ABALOBI offers small-scale fishing communities access to a suite of tools and technologies designed to catalyse development through community-driven fisheries rebuilding and improvement. 

We provide training to fishers and fish workers in various relevant fields including personal financial and financial literacy, organisational development, first aid, logistics, cold chain, quality control, fish handling, marketing, ICTs, and many more topics. 

Participating fishers can access the ABALOBI Marketplace platform, a digital seafood market enabling them to sell directly to end consumers and eliminating the middlepersons from the supply chain, vastly improving their income, breaking down established predatory deby cycles, and reestablishing fishers as value creators and owners of their own enterprise. Further, we offer women in the communities access to the Marketplace for their value-added seafood products such dried, pickled, and processed fish, sea salts and other pantry items. We facilitate the fair payment and formal recognition of womens' roles in small-scale fisheries by mediating between groups to formalise jobs, and offer direct payment via ABALOBI for their work, ensuring that they receive consistently fair pay. 

We foster organisational development and fisheries rebuilding, working with communities to understand and map out their greatest pain points and challenges, conducting extensive scoping and risk assessments across social, ecological, and financial spheres, and collaborating in the co-development of bespoke workplans to address these through our combined market access and capacity-building programme. 

The ABALOBI Marketplace platform has recently achieved break-even status, negating the need for additional funding to sustain the operations, although this is a seasonal market and it is anticipated that future market fluctuations may necessitate minor cash injections to weather the off-season sales decline. ABALOBI charges a small logistics fee to facilitate cold chain, deliveries, and payments, utilising these monies to run the platform. Our projections indicate that by the end of 2024, the platform will be self-sustaining. 

We have raised substantial grant funding in support of our broader operations to date, approximately ZAR 10 million in 2023 with a similar estimated figure in 2024. 

Key funders and partners currently supporting ABALOBI include:

The Happel Foundation 

The Oak Foundation 

Coleman Family Ventures 

Cartier for Nature Foundation 

Schmidt Marine Technology Partners 

Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance 

Swedish Society for Nature Conservation 

Food & Agricultural Organization of the United Nations 

Government of Flanders 

Worldwide Fund for Nature 

Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) 

African Union 

Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies (MACP) 

Blue Action Fund 

SeyCCAT 

United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 

Resource Legacy Fund FishChoice 

FisheryProgress