Presentation made at the Conference on Fisheries and Coastal Environment (The Accra Conference 2017): Towards a Community-Based Management Plan for Ankobra River Estuarine Fishery

Co-management or collaborative management is a promising means of improving resource conditions, particularly, where centralized fisheries management is a challenge. In collaborative management, authority and responsibility for managing fisheries resources are shared between government and resource users. A pilot community-based fisheries management planning process for the Ankobra River estuary was initiated under the auspices of the USAID-funded Sustainable Fisheries Management Project (SFMP). During this process, rapid rural appraisals were conducted; estuarine fish species were inventoried and prioritized by resource users on the basis of food security importance and commercial value. Subsequently, a management committee which was constituted led the identification of fishing grounds and development of management measures such as closed seasons and closed areas for the priority species. The information gathered was used to prepare a community-based fisheries management plan for the Ankobra River estuary. The process used in this pilot project is proving to be a successful and useful approach for managing the fisheries of small systems such as estuaries and lagoons.

• Towards-Community-based-fisheries-management_Cephas-Asare_HM_25Sept17 pdf (3876kb) [ download ]