Consortium unveils new aquaculture support project in East Africa

A new consortium made up of African and European organizations has unveiled a project promoting the growth of East Africa’s aquaculture sector, with a focus on training fish farmers and other stakeholders across the farmed-fish supply and value chains.

The new EUR 2 million (USD 1.96 million) capacity-building project, to be promoted by the consortium dubbed “Samaki Poa” – a Swahili expression meaning “awesome fish” – has brought together five organizations with financing from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). The participants include Blue Planet, Lake Harvest Group, Larive International, Lattice Aquaculture, and Skretting/Tunga Nutrition.

“The newly launched ‘Samaki Poa’ consortium will improve food security and provide practical and applicable expertise to empower the aquaculture sector in East Africa,” the groups said in a joint statement.

The consortium will develop tailor-made digital and vocational training courses to give an estimated 10,000 current and aspiring fish farmers throughout Africa improved access to relevant knowledge in fish farming and associated value chain businesses.

“The e-curriculum, consisting of animated videos covering all relevant topics for tilapia and catfish farming, will be freely available on the newly launched website www.howtodoaquaculture.com,” the consortium said.

The project has been designed to enable access even to users that don’t have access to the internet through the upgrading of five Tunga Nutrition farm supply hubs in East Africa, to allow for on-site training.

“Besides digital training, there will also be on-site vocational training,” the consortium said.

Within the project, a new aquaculture academy will be established in Jinja, Uganda, following the success of a similar academy in Kenya.

In both Kenya and Uganda, aquaculture specialists drawn from the consortium will train more than 1,200 fish farmers on the most-important aspects of the fish-farming business.

“We are elated with the skillset brought together in this consortium from fish feeds, hatchery, farming, training, and digital content creations…all necessary expertise is brought together for maximum sector benefit,” Larive International Project Coordinator Wouter van Vliet said.

The consortium anticipates that with the establishment of a new hatchery in Jinja, Uganda – and its vocational and digital training efforts – the “Samaki Poa” project will impact 7,500 households and create 1,250 jobs throughout the aquaculture value chain in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.  

Photo courtesy of Food Tech Africa