EXECUTIVE SUMMARY COM11 RPTQ1 FY14 508

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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The primary goal of the USAIDCOMFISH project is to support the Senegalese Ministry of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, via its technical Departments and particularly the Marine Fisheries Department DPM, to implement the Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector Policy Letter LPS, which guides national efforts on the sustainable management of fisheries resources. Per the 1998 Fisheries Act, the project uses CLPAs as institutional entry points to establish collaborative management plans for ecosystem- based, sustainable and collaborative management of fisheries resources in Senegal. All project activities contribute to improve resilience to climate change for communities as well as for marine and coastal ecosystems by introducing, demonstrating and instituting adaptive and effective strategies. With regard to policy reformdialogue, the project played an active role in a series of events such as the pre-validation of the national sardinella management plan and its articulation with local management plans, the pursuit of consultations on climate change, the validation of the national strategy against IUU fishing, the efforts made to support DPM, and the delivery of support to women in the fisheries sector. On the development of institutional and stakeholder capacity, six workshops were organized to establish sardinella consultation frameworks in the Mbour, Dakar and Rufisque divisions. These workshops trained 146 stakeholders from 10 local artisanal fishery councils within the project intervention area as well as officers from the Ministry of Fisheries. For the reinforcement of the project’s scientific knowledge base, IUPA pursued studies on the octopus fishery in Yoff by collecting data on the natural and human environment, and on fishermen’s local ecological knowledge on this species. The collaborative management plan on sardinella was prepared and submitted to DPM to begin the technical validation process before the plan goes to artisanal and industrial fishing stakeholders, and then to the other validation bodies. Parallel to this, the project continued to develop CLPA capacity in its ongoing work to establish consultation frameworks for broader engagement, so that all the relevant actors take part in establishing the conditions for managing priority stocks and validating the management measures from these consultations. About the testing and implementation of strategies, best practices and policies, the project obtained the approval of Local Agreements Convention Locale for the CLPAs in RufisqueBargny and YenneDialaw respectively by the Divisional Officer of Rufisque and the sub-Divisional Officer of Bambilor. The project also continued to implement local conventions on the Petite Côte, and to support some 20,940 fisheries stakeholders in applying the rules in these CLs. On climate change, the project finalized vulnerability assessments for the CLPAs in RufisqueBargny, YenneDialaw and Joal. It validated the first three 3 climate change adaptation plans in these CLPAs to allow the actors to validate a collaborative action plan and begin to implement it without delay with support from USAIDCOMFISH. Some 146 persons acquired stronger capacity to cope with the impacts of climate variability and change. To continue generating socio-economic benefits for women, the project pursued its efforts to modernize the processing facility, so that it is ready in the next quarter, and to continue to deliver training to the women processers as it has been doing. 4

2. INTRODUCTION