Programme description

Title: BENEFIT (Benguela Environment Fisheries Interaction and Training) Programme, Namibia
Client: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Country: Africa, transnational (located in Namibia)
Lead executing agency: Secretariat of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
Overall term: 1997 to 2008

Context

The BENEFIT project is a regional program of the Southern African Development Community (SADEC) countries - Angola, Namibia, and South Africa. All three countries are engaged in intensive commercial fisheries in their territorial coastal waters of the Benguela Current, which ranks among the world’s richest fishing grounds. The necessity for transboundary management of the marine environment and its living marine resources was identified as an important environmental and political matter. However, the lack of expert and institutional capacity for regional fisheries research and the lack of a regional marine environmental monitoring network were regarded as the main problems. Due to this situation, independent and regionally uncoordinated national management decisions were made on several occasions in the past, leaving a negative impact on the entire fisheries sector of the region and a strong tendency towards overexploitation.

Objective

BENEFIT was directed towards an adequate utilization of marine organism, mainly but not only fish, in the Benguela Current region. The objective was to increase the capacity of the bordering countries to use effective environmental monitoring and ecosystem-wide marine research for the sustainable management of their fishing resources.

Approach

The three border countries of the Benguela Current region had major discrepancies in their levels of capacity in marine sciences. The concept includes primarily levelling out the differences within their own capacity, calling on the advanced institutes in South Africa (South–South knowledge transfer) and where shortcomings had been identified, with assistance of international co-operation partners.  A strategy was chosen in which the programme organised meetings and symposiums to exchange scientific information and data. A monitoring network for data collection was established, and scientists of the region had been newly recruited or upgraded, to increase capacity for data processing and analysis towards fisheries management. Apart of training courses and formal studies (33 scholarships for B.sc, M.sc. and Phd was granted) trainees were seconded to international research programmes initiated by the BENEFIT secretariat. Training on the job remains the principal methodology to improve scientific standards of the three national marine institutes.

Results achieved so far

The Project established a network to exchange environmental data, monitored in each country. The scientific capacity of the national marine institutes had significantly improved due to more and better qualified personnel. The training and upgrading possibilities provided by BENEFIT were of direct benefit to the scientists and contributed indirectly to the sustainable utilisation of the fish resources. Better understanding of the dynamics of the environment allowed more appropriate management and hence provided work and income security for the fishermen and employees in the fisheries sector. The newly established scientific exchange network is an obvious improvement towards a joint regional ecosystem approach for fisheries management, EAF. The most significant impact was the mutual agreement to establish the Benguela Current Commission, BCC, to implement survey monitoring and control from the year 2012 onwards in order to enforce fisheries regulations, the three countries had agreed upon.

Further information

• Local website of the BENGUELA Programme
  www.benefit.org.na