Fisheries Performance in Africa: An Analysis Based on Data from 14 Countries DP 20-24

The Fisheries Performance Indicators is a data collection tool that allows comparable fisheries data in the environmental, economic and community dimensions to be collected even in data-poor environments. In this paper, data collected for  35 fisheries in 14 African countries that make up 54.8% of Africa’s reported fish landings are analyzed and compared to global averages. Similar to a previous global analysis, our results indicate no trade-offs between the different pillars of sustainability, as all are positively correlated.
These results are even more pronounced for Africa than globally. The only exception is the relationship between environment and community in Africa, which is statistically insignificant, similarly to open access fisheries globally. The African average scores are lower than the global scores in all categories, which is not unexpected given the high number of open access fisheries. However, factors that are not fisheries specific are most important for this result, suggesting that a country’s development status is important for
fisheries performance.