Constraints and Opportunities for Community Participation in the Management of the Lake Victoria Fisheries

Abstract

During the last 20 years the Lake Victoria fisheries have been completely transformed. From being a locally based fishery with little intervention and capital investment from outside, the present fishery is dominated by national and international capital penetrating the industry. There are many institutions and organisations involved in the management and development of the Lake Victoria fisheries. These institutions include Government departments and agencies of the three states sharing Lake Victoria (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), international development banks, donor organisations, local, national and international NGOs. Despite their differences in size and approach to development issues, they share at least one common feature: They all emphasise the importance of promoting "community participation" in the management of the Lake Victoria fisheries. "Community participation" is a vague and an elusive concept and the different institutions involved in the Lake Victoria fisheries do not have a common conception about what "community participation" would involve when implemented in the context of the Lake Victoria fisheries. The main objective of this paper is to discuss some aspects of this concept and relate it to changes which have occurred in the Lake Victoria fisheries. We discuss what we think are some of the relevant areas for community participation in the Lake Victoria fisheries. We adopt a "holistic" approach to community participation and we suggest that participation should not only seek to involve people in the management of the production sector of the fisheries, but also should include the processing and distribution sectors and consumption of fish. We discuss how the broader context of the Lake Victoria fisheries has changed over the last two decades with rich outsiders coming into the fisheries and investing in it. This has resulted in a change of technologies in both the production, processing and distribution sectors of the fisheries which is closely related to the development of overseas markets. We discuss the role the governments are playing in promoting the export of fish from Lake Victoria to Europe, Japan and USA and the effects the export of fish have for local food security and the local employment situation. A main point we make is that "community participation" is closely linked to opportunities for obtaining employment and income from the various sectors of the fisheries. Employment in one of the sectors of the fisheries is, in our view, the major "entry point" for participation of the local people in the Lake Victoria fisheries. We discuss in detail how the new technologies introduced in the fisheries and the new markets for fish from Lake Victoria to a large extent have contributed to a loss of employment for the local people in many sectors of the fisheries. We say that unless people are able to retain their jobs in the fisheries there is very little for many members of the local communities to participate about.