LESSONS FROM CARE’S WORK ON FISHERIES AND AQUACULTURE IN AFRICA AND OUR FARMER FIELD AND BUSINESS SCHOOLS APPROACH

CARE is a major international humanitarian agency delivering emergency relief and long-term international development projects in over 100 countries to save lives, defeat poverty and achieve social justice. I all our work, we put women and girls in the center because we know that we cannot overcome poverty until all people have equal rights and opportunities.

Over the past years, CARE has implemented projects in Africa on Fisheries and Aquaculture. Our work on Fisheries’ and aquaculture is nested in our ‘She Feeds the World Framework’ and pays particular attention to gender equality and the empowerment of women in fish value chains. We aim to achieve the following with our fisheries work:

1. Protect marine and freshwater ecosystems through environmental, climate change and disaster risk management interventions.
2. Enhance maternal and child nutrition given the importance of fish to maternal and child nutrition and wider food security in many resource poor and vulnerable communities where we work in.

1. Collaborate with community groups, Local governments, WWF, World Fish, FAO among others and strengthen their capacities.

This presentation provides information on the lessons we have learnt implementing fisheries and aquaculture projects in 5 African countries (Benin, Egypt, Mozambique, Malawi and Ghana), our integrated and Gender Transformative ‘Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS)’ approach for training farmers, the evidence of success and impacts we have generated so far from the FFBS approach and how we are now  scaling-up this approach to different sectors including Fisheries and Aquaculture in collaboration with FAO.

Key words: poverty, gender, aquaculture, fisheries, and farmer field schools.