Recommendations
There are myriad challenges and digital solutions that can be found for fisheries across the five Commonwealth regions. The applicability of different innovations/services is largely determined by the developmental status of the fisheries (which generally correlates to national GDP within regions) and the division between SSF and LSF.
Based on what we believe to be a good (but not fully comprehensive) coverage of the evidence for each region, The Commonwealth Secretariat can play the following roles in supporting digitalisation in the five regions.
We see the biggest need for digitalisation across the SSF in African, Asian and Pacific SIDS and believe that with more detailed research on a national level, opportunities for smooth and coherent digitalisation will clearly present themselves.
In terms of further work, looking at digitalisation per country through KI engagement with country-specific governments would be beneficial. This would allow for digitalisation within Commonwealth fisheries to be understood at a higher resolution and more tailored recommendations to be made. Working groups with different relevant stakeholders per country of interest would be invaluable for this process, as would investigating neighbouring countries to uncover any impacts from outside of specific countries themselves.
Pillar i
Recommendations: Digital Innovations
- Implement programmes in under-developed SSF contexts that create awareness around and incentivise digitalisation that does not necessarily rely on comprehensive mobile connectivity (e.g., low data apps or self-recording apps that can be downloaded post-event with better signal or hard wire downloaded to a centralised system).
- Promote collaborations between private business and government to bring innovation into under-developed fisheries contexts whilst helping governments harness such innovations and scale them up nationally.
- Provide governments with country-specific “state-of-the-art” reports on the state of digital technologies in their different fisheries sectors, highlighting key opportunities for development.
- In very under-developed cases, offer training and capacity building programmes for mobile phone and application use/literacy and use such pilots to “test the water” for future development of digitalisation.
Pillar ii
Recommendations: Data Infrastructure
- Support governments in data policy formation to facilitate data sharing and coordination between government and fishing related industries. This will help develop baseline data upon which good management as well as innovation rests.
- Provide government employees with training on database structure, application programming interface development and cloud-based server use.
- In very basic data settings, ensure governments are working to support personal identification. Personal identification is vital to help individuals eventually progress towards personal finance solutions as and when such technologies come online.
Pillar iii
Recommendations: Business Development Services
- Promote the formation of coherent groups (like cooperatives) that lie between the level of individual fisher and government body. This will help give fishers a more centralised consensus-driven voice in business and likely support microfinance programmes that could be used to get certain sectors off the ground with new technologies/innovations. This may also facilitate entrepreneurship and likely facilitate private sector investment.
- Promote programmes through government that incentivise data capture, e.g., subscription models in which the government initially pays cooperative groups for data collection to get foundational databases up and running.
- Promote more government spending on baseline research to highlight data gaps that may limit innovation in the sector.
The Base
Recommendations: Enabling Environment for Digitalisation
- Help governments develop policies and legislation (when required) to facilitate digitalisation (e.g., data sharing agreements, incentivisation/funding programmes, better digital policies, industry-government partnership agreements and ultimately better investment in infrastructure).
- Encourage governments to reduce costs for connectivity/broadband.
- Undertake national surveys to identify target areas that are ready for innovation as well as areas that will need to be brought up to speed so that they can receive innovation that may be present in other areas.
- Promote knowledge sharing through the promotion of case studies and the exchange of experiences between stakeholders. This will help support the utilisation of digital fisheries.