Aquaculture plays an important role in food security and nutrition by providing high-quality animal protein especially for pregnant women, babies and children in the first 1,000 days. It also creates employment and sources of livelihood. Fish seed is a basic input for successful aquaculture and plays an important role in providing food and an income. However, aquaculture seed systems are confronted by many constraints including inadequate technical know-how, poor access to credit, poor quality broodstock and low survival rate (below 65%) to fingerling stage . The Technologies for African Agricultural transformation (TAAT) program funded by African Development Bank through the Aquaculture Compact led by WorldFish deployed a quaculture technologies to increase productivity in 12 African countries : Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia.
Two s elected fish breeders from each country were trained in 2018 and 2019 at the WorldFish R egional T raining Centre, Abbassa , Egypt on broodstock management, mass production of mono-sex tilapia, larval rearing techniques, and feeding. Demonstration sites were identified in the selected countries and supported with improved broodstock and other quality production inputs. Step-down trainings were also conducted in the countries. P rivate sector fish farms and hatcheries were used to build capacity of other fish breeders to facilitate accelerated technology adoption and scaling up. The intervention to increase fish productivity and availability of quality fish seed of mono-sex tilapia produced more than128,269,800 tilapia fingerlings in the 12 countries. Mass production of fingerlings in hapa, use of probiotics, pairing brood stock ratio accompanied with Better Management Practices (BMPs) were successfully disseminated and adopted by 31,951 fish breeders as beneficiaries effectively using the technologies. The adoption of these technologies in these countries has resulted to higher survival rate of fingerlings (>90%) and increased production. To scale up the technologies, several African governments including Malawi, Zambia, Cameroon and Benin have accessed loans from multilateral donors which are made available to small and medium scale fish farms and enterprises.
Although the TAAT Aquaculture Compact has successfully overcome the challenges of tilapia seed production system in Africa, funding of long-term genetic improvement program s is necessary to maintain the path towards increased productivity of farmed tilapia.