Research into human resource development in Sub-Saharan African aquaculture and fisheries sectors has highlighted the need for access to up-to-date materials for vocational training. Demand for distance-learning capacity, originally deriving from need for on-site training of entry-level & technical staff, has intensified with the global COVID19 pandemic, where face-to-face training has been restricted. With increasing commercialisation of aquaculture across the continent and with over 85% of the workforce on farms and across the value chain being secondary school level or lower, the role of online vocational training is crucial to this context.
This current CGIAR Research Program on FISH aimed to support vocational training through connecting key partners with training materials from their repository of over 750 documents of varying relevance. These documents hosted in the FISH agri-food systems program, were generated through work with partners in bilateral projects across south Asia, Pacific and Africa over a period of 5 years to produce a wide variety of resources. The FISH program intends to make available these resources to wider audiences. Previously, the impact of these documents, as outputs from a variety of projects in collaboration with or funded by WorldFish, in vocational education contexts had been limited and a wider lack of awareness and ability to identify and link documents to the specific needs of the various vocational training curricula and courses across the African continent. Indeed, the development and success of digital educational resources more broadly has been limited by a lack of structure and ease of access. This project aims to support vocational training through the wider dissemination of FISH program materials, achieved through identification of the most relevant materials that matched partners’ vocational training needs. These activities led to the classification and topical “clustering” of materials to increase their accessibility moving forward. It also provided African vocational training institutes and their trainees access to and benefit from relevant Asian/Pacific training materials, often from different contexts and perspectives, where similar species such as tilapia, catfish and shrimp are cultivated.
As with any intellectual property, development of educational and training materials is costly. Plausible economic models for these types of freely available digital resources in aquaculture and fisheries education rely on the donation of pre-existing materials that can be readily repurposed for education. Using the large repository of FISH program materials for vocational training purposes supports more equitable access to information, extends the impact and value of the original funding, and increases collaboration, partnership, and connectivity between researchers and the wider workforce and beneficiaries. The resources are put into further use through their adaptation by vocational training partners.