MTWAPA, Kenya — On a mid-morning in March, Mohamed Mwazigona, 58, had just landed a measly catch on the town beach in Mtwapa on Kenya’s north coast. His crew was preparing the boat for a second trip into the sea with hopes of better luck.

As traders started trickling in to buy fish, Mwazigona sat on a broken upturned boat staring at the horizon beyond the sea. His morning trip had netted only 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of fish. He worried that his catches had decreased a lot in recent years.

“The number of fishermen has gone up; we have become too many,” he said. That’s the reason he left his village of Shariani, 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the north, to base his fishing in Mtwapa, which he felt had fewer fishers and better access to markets.

In Kenya, local beach management units (BMUs), like the Mtwapa BMU that Mwazigona belongs to, have a legal mandate to support collection of fisheries data for submission to the government: mainly the type of fish its members catch and the weight. These data are meant to inform government decision-making about small-scale fisheries so it can help reverse the competition for dwindling fish stocks that Mwazigona and his colleagues are experiencing. They are also meant to help fishers themselves make decisions on where and when to fish. However, the BMUs’ small-scale fisheries data have been inaccurate and inaccessible to stakeholders.

To address this problem and improve the sustainability of Kenya’s small-scale fisheries, WorldFish, a nonprofit research organization based in Malaysia, is running a project to improve the collection of this data, harmonize them and make them accessible. It’s part of a wider seven-year program called the Asia–Africa BlueTech Superhighway geared at restoring marine and coastal ecosystems by developing sustainable aquatic food-production systems, starting with five countries: Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mozambique and Bangladesh.

The fisheries data project running in Kenya, along with Tanzania and Mozambique, is modeled around Peskas, a collaboration between WorldFish and the government of Timor-Leste that began in 2016 and now serves as the country’s national fisheries monitoring system. Previously, gaps in small-scale fisheries data meant that in Timor-Leste, “policymakers had no evidence upon which to develop a fisheries strategy to improve food security, incomes and resilience to climate change,” the WorldFish website states.

Closing data gaps

Kenya is now trying to close its own fisheries data gaps by taking the same approach.

BMUs have long worked with the Kenya Fisheries Service (KeFS), the government agency that manages fisheries, to collect data from fishers like Mwazigona. Only in 2022 did KeFS officers assigned to BMUs switch from logging the data on paper to digital methods. This data collection faces ongoing challenges, according to Emmanuel Mbaru, a senior scientist at WorldFish who is leading the implementation of the fisheries data project in Kenya. These include a lack of financing, poor infrastructure, inadequate capacity and low levels of literacy among fishers, and even the fishers’ unwillingness to share data. He said it took years of sensitization on the importance of sharing data for small-scale fishers to agree to it. “I think that hurdle has since been crossed, but then understanding the whole mechanism of data collection is still a challenge,” he said.

Mwazigona said the Mtwapa BMU’s participation in KeFS data collection has accorded members some opportunities, like boat donations from NGOs. But, he said, the support could be bigger. If he could get the data about his catch and use them to access credit, he said he would be happy. “If only that was possible, I would invest in my own fishing equipment,” he said. The boat Mwazigona uses is owned collectively through the BMU, and he has to pay to use it on every fishing trip.

Mbaru said data will eventually be available to fishers via the WorldFish project. Since its advent, 30 government-funded enumerators are now working at landing sites to beef up the data stream, capturing catch data on digital devices that relay them to WorldFish in real time. The project has also installed solar-powered trackers on 150 boats along the Kenyan coast that transmit route data in real time. Each participating boat owner has a simplified phone application for logging the type, weight and other attributes of the fish they catch.

From his office in Mombasa, Mbaru can track fishing activity along the entire Kenyan coast via the Peskas platform. Among the data that appear on his dashboard are the routes taken by each of the boats and the duration of each trip. The dashboard also displays data on fishing effort distribution, catch per unit of fishing effort, revenue per unit of fishing effort and estimated catch in metric tons.

Data from the trackers and the enumerators are linked in the underlying database. “Someone is now merging these two data sets together to come up with a complete picture of where the fish was caught, which gear was used, what time was spent fishing, what time was spent searching for fish or traveling to the fishing area and the actual fishing location, which is now geo-referenced with the help of the trackers,” Mbaru said.

Where do the fishers fish?

At Mayungu landing site in the town of Malindi, 100 km (62 mi) north of Mtwapa, it had not been a good day for Ahmed Bakari, who owns three boats.

“This work is becoming more difficult,” he told Mongabay. “Today, I spent 2,500 shillings [$19.32] on fuel and they have come back with only 4 kilos [9 pounds]. At 250 shillings [$1.93] per kilo, it is not even enough to pay for the fuel.”

One of his boats has a WorldFish tracker installed, and with the application on his phone, he can see the movements of his boat from shore. He remotely marks areas of the sea where the fishers onboard find fish.

“It functions like a GPS. You can easily record and it gives you information on depth of the sea in meters. So, it is a good thing because even if it doesn’t have a fish finder, you can record where you found fish today so that you can go back there tomorrow,” he said. When he does this, he is lucky sometimes to get fish in the same area.

Zachary Ogari, a KeFS fisheries officer, expressed confidence that the fishers will benefit from the data collected in other ways as well, once they can fully access them. “If they want to see which landing site is catching what, or data on specific species of fish for them to know where to target. So, that is why we are developing the database,” he said.

Mbaru said Kenya’s small-scale fisheries data are clearer and more accurate now. And they can start answering some long-standing questions, such as how often do fishers return to certain sites? “We are seeing that a good percentage of fishers tend to go back to where they fished before, and this is documented evidence now,” he said.

Additionally, researchers are able to better estimate catch per unit of effort (CPUE), a measure of fish abundance that is essential for determining if a fishery is sustainable, overfished or needs management intervention. Previously, they depended on the fishers’ word about what time they left port and when they returned and considered that interval the time spent fishing in estimating CPUE. But the fishers’ word is only so precise, Mbaru said, noting that a fisher may report that he left at 7 a.m., but in fact traveled for 40 minutes before he started fishing, and then may omit the fact that he moved to numerous locations. This would overstate time spent fishing and result in an underestimate of CPUE, he said — a problem solved by the data from the trackers.

Eyes on illegal fishing

The trackers capture all fishers’ activities, including illegal ones like fishing in marine protected areas. According to Mbaru, data captured during the project will not be used to prosecute individual fishers for violations. But he said the project advocates for the wide adoption of the tracking devices. “[The government] could use them for other purposes if they want because they will give you accurate information. So, if they want to use them for compliance purposes, they can do that,” he said.

Ogari, the KeFS officer, is keen on deploying the trackers to curb illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. “We are able to prevent IUU because if you can monitor your [boat], you can also monitor where it is fishing and how much fish it is getting and from where,” he said. He also said he hopes the data will help in marine conservation.

Mbaru said the small-scale fisheries data will help inform the ongoing development of a marine spatial plan for Kenyan waters, aimed at balancing competing economic, environmental and social objectives and ensuring the sustainable use of marine and coastal resources. “This will be made possible by having a clear delineation of where the local artisanal fishers operate so that as they plan on blue economy investment, this is going to play a bigger role in understanding the whole ecosystem of small-scale fisheries,” he said.

“This data is a game changer,” Ogari said, noting that the WorldFish project will inform how KeFS collects small-scale fisheries data even after it closes. “We are hoping that after the funding lapses, we will write more proposals to look for more funding so that we can install trackers on more boats,” he said.

Banner image: A fisher walks with his catch at the Shimoni port in Kwale county, Kenya, in 2022. Image by AP Photos / Brian Inganga.

As a fishing port rises in Kenya, locals see threats to sea life, livelihoods

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Cite this article

Anthony Langat (2026). To improve its floundering fisheries, Kenya boosts data collection on artisanal fleet. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-321034

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