Earth Day, 22 April, is a reminder that many countries have already consumed their lot of annual resources in April or May and are living beyond their means at the expense of others. This year’s motto „Our Power, Our Planet“ draws attention to the agency all people have to change things together for the better.

Mundus maris therefore invited to a webinar on 12 May that put the emphasis on what advances can be observed at ground level and how they may encourage other to help scale such opportunities, adapting them to their specific context. Prof. Stella Williams of Mundus maris was the moderator.

First to speak was Prof. Wolfgang Schade of the Fraunhofer Institute HHI and VoltaviewAfrica. His focus was on successful examples of solar minigrids to help provide electricity under local control to a series of practical applications that can prolong study times in the evening, reduce back-breaking manual work for women in a money-making electric laundry, and electric mobility of inland waters for fishing and transport.

He went on to illustrate the advantages of new sodium-ion batteries to store solar energy for times when the sun does not shine. These don’t rely on expensive lithium like conventional batteries but use readily available sodium. Individual cells get delivered from China and are assembled in Tanzania to complete batteries, protected by purpose made cases that allow use on the water and elsewhere.

VoltaviewAfrica was collaborating with a local firm to expand and set up the first assembly line of sodium-ion batteries in Africa. Training and various forms of capacity building were part of the collaboration to ensure short-to medium-term autonomy for maintenance, repair and expansion of applications. The slides are available here.

All were keen to hear more from Kazeem Olayinka of the Mundus maris group in Nigeria about advances in training up interested people in the villages around Lagos how to process themselves the over-abundant water hyacinth and other invasive plants into useful applications. Alas, the network failed him and he could not connect. Catch a glimpse of the opportunities creating the excitement in the short report about an initial demonstration workshop.

The moderator thus called on Cornelia E Nauen to talk about the Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF) Academy’s role in strengthening the capacities of men and women in SSF to engage in ocean governance with a focus on West Africa. This initiative started to support the operationalisation of the Voluntary Guidelines to Ensure Sustainable SSF in the context of food security and poverty eradication. It had become urgent as the unfair competition between export oriented industrial fishing with artisanal fisheries. Hundreds of thousands of people depended on the latter for their livelihoods and the development of a strong local and regional economy as well as food security particularly of people with little money. Centralised management systems generally not providing pathways for active participation of small-scale fishers, men and women, typically lead to management failures, because they pick up signals of overfishing late and tend to prefer notions of industrial activities over less structured and distributed artisanal activities. That means the fishers‘ ecological knowledge with finer spatial and temporal resolution than what occasional scientific surveys can produce has no place in the decision making process.

Being mostly excluded, small-scale fishers and the women handling and marketing catches do not feel bound by management decisions operating, as they typically do, in the informal economy without formal recognition and access to most social support services.

To change this for the better in the spirit of the SSF Guidelines adopted by the FAO Committee of Fisheries in 2014 Mundus maris launched the SSF Academy with men and women of all ages, professions and regions across Senegal in 20218. In a series of pilot activities inclusive participatory methods were adjusted and successfully tested in two fishing villages. While the pandemic starting in early 2020 put an end to some of the support for strengthening the groups‘ capacities for collective action and outreach to other groups as originally intended, it did build significant self confidence and organisational capacity that shows til today. The central tenet is to provide a safe space for respectful dialogue, where everybody is welcome and nobody is judged. Academy participants are invited to learn and innovate together and, indeed found renewed trust and agency to advance the legitimate demands of their groups.

An early example is shown in this video with footage from Nabia Ngom, one of the successful users of what she learned at the Academy.

Mundus maris is open to support groups elsewhere with the Academy methodology adapted to their local context and focused on creating sufficient local capacity to share and amplify with others to enable broader-based local action towards co-governance and better outcomes for people and planet. The slides are available here.

The lively Q&A part of the webinar ascertained the interest in these activities from the ground up. They show the way for cheaper and better solutions to widespread problems across Africa that are still holding people’s development back. Opportunities abound, it’s time to use them to the fullest thanks to local and international cooperation.