AU-IBAR CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE SHAPING THE DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY OF AFRICAN FISHERIES AND AQUACULTURE

Despite Africa’s vast aquatic resource endowment, its fisheries and the aquaculture sectors are performing substantially below their productive potential due to human resource and institutional capacity constraints. The creation of the African Union Centres of Excellence (CoE) to serve the fisheries and aquaculture sectors, under the auspices of the African Union Inter-African for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), is arguably a timeous visionary strategy to address the capacity requirements for Africa to transform its fish production output to sustainably meet its food security requirements and develop its ‘blue economy’. Various analyses highlight deficiencies in human resource capacity as a primary constraining factor in the achievement of sustainable fisheries management and aquaculture development. Due to Africa’s rapid population growth, the continent  is facing a ‘demographic wave’ of young people entering the workplace. This phenomenon presents numerous opportunities for aquaculture and fisheries. With the necessary investment in education, training and institutional capacity, this generation of human resources could reshape activities and practices in aquaculture and fisheries to increase per capita productivity and the gross domestic product (GDP). The network of African Union CoEs will provide the essential educational foundation for human resource capacity development through specialist knowledge required for a transformed aquaculture and fisheries output to meet food security requirements and develop the blue economy.

Thus far, the experience of the COEs shows that this is indeed possible. For this to ensue efficiently the current CoE capacities and its respective curricula needs to be aligned with the development needs of the fisheries and aquaculture sector. That is, CoE institutions must be ‘fit for purpose’ to deliver on this mandate for the African Union and member states. Historically, the CoEs were inaugurated and expanded to respond, as a whole,  to the aquaculture and fisheries requests of the AU-IBAR. However, the CoE staff were simultaneously committed to full-time teaching and research responsibilities at the university, with extremely limited additional capacity. As such, their ability to serve AU-IBAR needs was limited and remains so.

To fully achieve the impact that CoEs could now have on the aquaculture and fisheries sectors in Africa, their  capacity must be reviewed. The following suggestions should be taken into consideration:

• Establish  Education/Research Chairs, based at a selection of the CoEs, to focus 100% of their efforts on the mandate of all the AU-IBAR’s CoEs;
• Provide access to funding for (i) more postdoctoral fellows who are researchers, (ii) teaching development, and (iii) curriculum design expertise for them at the start of their careers so that they can provide the additional capacity at the CoE to seamlessly deliver on the mandate of the AU-IBAR and mobilise these young academics across the continent;
• Increase funding for collaboration in research and teaching across the continent for current and authentic development of foundational, practical, and reflexive competencies of students, researchers, and teachers from the different CoEs;
• Increase the number of bursaries for MSc and PhD to sustain the succession reservoir of experts and link the bursary opportunity to the collaboration activities above.
• Develop and implement a marketing and recruitment strategy aimed at school-going youth who are the next generation of stakeholders in aquaculture and fisheries sustainability.

This presentation will take the form of a participatory dialogue to further refine this conceptual framework for the CoEs shaping the development and sustainability of African aquaculture and fisheries to transform its fish production output to sustainably meet its food security requirements and develop its ‘blue economy’. The discussion points that emerge in the dialogue will be provided to the AU-IBAR.