Poverty alleviation and small-scale fisheries
The SSF Guidelines themselves, in Chapter 13, refer to the need to support implementation and for monitoring. Hence, to facilitate their implementation, country-tailored implementation plans are needed that identify strategies and actions to be taken at the country level. Such a comprehensive implementation plan can be drawn up in the format of a National Plan of Action for the implementation of the SSF Guidelines (NPOA-SSF).
The challenge is to develop a capacity-building process by which countries, or indeed regional country groupings, can implement the FAO SSF Guidelines at local level, either through a National Plan of Action (NPOA) or alternative approaches as necessary. FAO has developed NPOA templates/guidance on a number of different issues e.g. Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, fishing capacity, sharks, and seabirds, and has approached facilitating their national / regional development and implementation in different ways. The IPOA-IUU Guidelines for example provide detailed advice on what countries should include/address as part of national level NPOA-IUU. To operationalize the SSF Guidelines, it was necessary to develop a ‘toolkit’ of different methodologies that can be selected to address the specific needs of SSF in different countries to address and operationalize the rather broad recommendations contained within the SSF Guidelines. This will mean: i) identifying for the statements in the Guidelines what they might mean in terms of possible action needed, and ii) developing a toolkit for countries to be able to select/pick from these possible actions those they would wish to implement based on relevance to priorities, needs, and the nationally-specific characteristics of small-scale fisheries. Once developed, technical assistance will build capacity at the regional level via a series of workshops and mentoring processes to implement them in support of national plans of action on SSF. This approach was implemented over three stages: (i) toolkit scoping and development, (ii) toolkit pilot-testing in selected countries and finalization and (iii) toolkit roll out.
Services Provided:The objective of this particular task is to complete Stage 2: the toolkit pilot-testing in selected countries and finalization of the toolkit. This toolkit - These will include a sector review/scoping study, a stakeholder mapping analysis, a gap analysis and a capacity needs assessment roadmap development, , awareness raising mechanisms and action plan preparation, development and stakeholder validation. – will have been initially developed over a previous Stage 1 consultancy. The objective of this state is therefore to validate the initial design through a pilot-testing process and build upon this experience to develop a final product that can be rolled out in Stage 3.
Madagascar and Namibia were selected for pilot testing of the toolkit as a whole, including the individual tool methodology options. This included: