Small-Scale Fisheries Academy

The Small-Scale Fisheries Academy aligns with the Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and local community engagement goals by celebrating local culture and promoting equitable active learning throughout the fisheries value chain and communities. They facilitate the co-creation of locally relevant knowledge and innovation, driving collective efforts towards gender and social justice in the blue economy, and bridging local concerns with global issues to enable the implementation of effective solutions that benefit both people and the planet.

The Academy promotes dialogue with and for women and men in small-scale fisheries (SSF), recognizing their knowledge and experience, and fostering interaction with others who provide complementary perspectives through scientific information and policies. The active and inclusive learning methods combine visual thinking and participatory leadership to enable scaling up positive results from an individual to a collective level.

The opportunity to express thoughts and perceptions through images strengthens strategic questioning by making the abstract concrete, illuminating the relationships between elements, and simplifying complexities. This process helps participants to understand complex concepts such as climate change and gender issues, relate issues to each other, identify the essentials, improve dialogue, and explore and integrate new ideas more easily. The training methodology applies a socio-ecological model inspired by a communications-based approach supporting social behavioral change. It engages participants in a gradual and multi-level change process touching on individual, family, peer group, and societal spheres.

The SSF Academy launched in November 2018 in Dakar was followed by a pilot phase in two fishing communities, Yoff and Hann in Senegal.

Participants were selected from within each community, inviting a diversity of professional, gender, and generational backgrounds. Involving professional, organizational, and religious leadership was encouraged, given strengthening multiplier roles. The only criterion was the availability of time to participate in the workshops. Provisions were made for childcare and food during the workshops to lower potential access constraints. The expressed objective was to support participants in acquiring sufficient proficiency with facilitation methods to become trainers within their communities and economic interest groups.

The original timing of one year with a joint assessment at the end needed to be prolonged due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first Academy experimental workshops allowed some empirical insights into how the conceptual approach can play out in practice.

The workshops started with a reminder of the inaugural event of the SSF Academy underpinned by graphical representations and an overview of the SSF Guidelines allowing participants to relate the significant SDGs with their own local reality.

Having set the scene, participants received a notebook and colored pens for their personal records. They were invited to choose a symbol to identify themselves and their notebook in the place of a nametag. In a circle, each one presented him or herself with a name and activity, showing their symbol and explaining the reason for this choice. This first step ensured inclusiveness and encouraged some participants to draw for the first time.

The workshop activities aimed to provide a framework for participants to reflect on their reality, starting with their vision of what constitutes a happy life. A vision makes seeing where we are going easier. Visualization is, therefore, the starting point for the process towards change. Participants developed drawings of a happy life individually, and visions of a happy community in groups.

The vision exercises supported the exploration of individual and collective pathways for change. The change journey canvas allowed each participant to define a one-year individual action plan for improving livelihoods, identifying priority actions for positive change, establishing trimester targets, and stating new ways to carry out their activities while tackling challenges and embracing opportunities along the road. Participants were able to make progress in their activities, which led to an increase in their income.

A second exercise focused on the SSF value chain. Participants mapped concrete and constructive solutions for value chain development to start implementing actions in the short term. The mapping presented the value chain concept through the visualization of all activities associated with different parties and allowed the recognition of the relationships between them. Using differently shaped canvases, such as diamonds, participants identified the priority issues when considering specific actions. Using the imagery of an action tree, they reflected on actions to address these issues.

Besides planning changes in economic activities, the dialogue and participatory visual exercises brought to light social and gender issues. Using the diamond canvas, participants were able to individually identify positive and negative aspects of being women or men in their families and communities. They visualized and perceived, in some cases for the first time, the existence of gender inequalities in a conscious way. Participants then reflected on these situations in gender-specific groups, prioritizing gender issues that must be addressed. Finally, organized in mixed groups, participants identified one major gender issue per group. Stimulated by the facilitator, each group identified its basic reasons for choosing their specific inequality, as well as the actions needed to promote changes toward gender equity. By discussing previously taboo topics, couples and families could prioritize desired behaviors and concrete actions that could allow changes in intra-household relationships.

In addition, the Academy allowed participants to explore socio-environmental adversities in their activities and the elements contributing to their resilience. This created the opportunity for planning collective action at the community level. Knowledge-sharing exercises supported this activity through videos and the invitation of academics as additional information providers.

Through the workshop series, participants made progress in understanding and appropriating the visual thinking tools. As the tools diversified and became more complex, the participants’ roles became more critical, and fast learners became active facilitators through their examples.

The simple diagrams of the GALS approach, such as the symbol, and the vision of a happy future, proved to be essential tools to invigorate the conversation and oriented participants towards inclusive results for every human being, regardless of gender, age, or economic activity.

The change journey canvas became an illustrated plan that defined concrete actions toward a desired livelihood change within one year based on each person’s current situation. Understanding of the tool and progress towards the defined plan vary among the learners, but there was considerable progress nevertheless. This means that the workshop proved to be effective and inclusive of people with low levels of formal education.

Using certain tools, such as gender justice diamonds and trees, was more challenging. At first glance, the invitation to identify and illustrate the positive and negative sides of their gender identity was hardly understood. As the exercise unfolded, a few participants’ openness and leadership allowed for diminishing others’ resistance. As a result, the group was able to identify the factors of lacking gender equity and carry out a deeper analysis of the root causes, expected behavior changes, and actions to support it.

In the immediate aftermath of the workshop, there have been early advancements in terms of strengthening individual incomes. The success of the workshop indicated the emergence of participatory leadership to enable scaling up positive results from individual to collective levels and learning how to avoid pitfalls identified along the road. It provides an outlook for improving a greater number of livelihoods by creating additional test bases in small-scale fishing communities in other countries.

The inclusive visual exercises support the exploration of individual and collective pathways for change. The change journey allows each participant to define a one-year action plan for improving livelihoods and identifying priority actions for a positive change. By establishing trimester targets and stating new ways to carry out their activities, they also think about tackling challenges and embracing opportunities along the road. Among the low-hanging fruits, participants could progress in their activities and increase their income.

Dialogue between different actors in the SSF value chain allows the identification of opportunities for improvement of working conditions, especially for the most vulnerable actors, enabling the negotiation of terms.

The dialogue, together with participatory visual exercises, had brought to the fore important social and gender issues. Previously considered taboo topics, couples and families could identify, discuss and prioritize desired behavioral changes.

In addition, the Academy allowed participants and their leaders to explore socio-environmental adversities in their activities. By better understanding the factors that contribute to their resilience to such effects, they focused on the opportunity for collective action at the community level. At this stage, we recognize empirical results such as women and men are advancing the understanding of their situation, creating a vision of change, and establishing plans to make it happen. They increased their sense of autonomy and control over their development process. It becomes more accessible for the currently most vulnerable (and sometimes even despised) actors, women in processing and marketing activities, to present themselves and value their work concerning other stakeholders in the value chain.

It presents early advancements in terms of strengthening individual income earning results in the face of obstacles and provides indications on the expected emergence of participatory leadership to enable scaling up positive results from individual to collective levels and learning how to avoid pitfalls identified along the road. It provides an outlook for scaling up by creating additional test bases in SSF communities in other countries.