Young people get a head start in the fish industry

The waters of Lake Victoria are calm off Dunga beach, Kisumu, as young entrepreneur Vincent and fisherman Nicholas climb into a wooden boat and head out to check on their fish.

Storks perch on rocks emerging from the water along the lakeside, while further out white-sailed dhow boats cut across the breeze. “It’s calm now but, in a few hours, it will be very choppy,” Nicholas observes.

The boat soon arrives at the offshore fish cages. Visible on the surface of the lake are 12 square metal frames, supported by blue plastic tanks filled with air. Under the water, a series of nets holds around 5,000 tilapias in each cage. Nicholas takes off his shoes and clambers onto a walkway at the edge of the cage, which rocks gently under his weight. He peels back the top layer of the net and reaches in to grab a few large fish, which he throws into the boat.

“The biggest challenge in Lake Victoria is reduced fish stock due to overfishing,” Nicholas explains. “That’s why I switched to cage farming. I buy all my fingerlings [small fish] from Aquaculture Barn. This is because of their quality and their pricing, which is very fair.”

Aquaculture Barn is a youth-led enterprise run by CEO Vincent Ochieng, 27. It is based at the water treatment works in Kisumu town and uses processed wastewater to supply tanks used to breed tilapia and catfish. These produce thousands of tiny fish, which the company sells to fish farmers like Nicholas.

Vincent got the idea for the business when he was a new graduate struggling to find work. “It was very difficult and demoralizing,” he recalls. “I faced stigma from employers because I was living in an informal settlement. I sent off hundreds of job applications while doing manual labour to get some money for rent and food. I couldn’t even get a position as a volunteer.”

As an aquaculture graduate, Vincent thought there might be work at Kisumu water treatment works. Here he met other young unemployed graduates like himself. He also discovered the fingerling facility, which had been built as part of an EU-funded project but was no longer in use. He asked the Council if the young people could take it over and run it. “They said they couldn’t pay us but agreed that we could run it as a youth collective and keep any profits that we made,” he says.

The big break for Vincent came when he entered the Generation Unlimited challenge for young innovators, run by Unicef. Through this, he received business skills training and seed funding of 1.2 million Kenya shillings, allowing him to turn the youth collective into a proper business. Vincent registered the company and used the funds to buy equipment and hire four employees – all young people like himself.

“Generation Unlimited really helped us at Aquaculture Barn,” he says. “It’s how we got our first foothold. The training helped us learn business skills and digital marketing and complete the missing pieces of the business. Now that Aquaculture Barn is a success, I want to give something back to other young people through internships and training. I’m very happy.”

Unicef Kenya is supporting Generation Unlimited, a multi-sector partnership which aims to see more than 30 million young Kenyans in education, training or employment by 2030. “We face an urgent challenge,” Unicef Kenya Youth Specialist Sandra Simbiri says. “Already, today’s young people are three times more likely than adults to be unemployed. To keep up with a rapidly changing labour market, Kenya’s young people need a full set of vocational skills. Generation Unlimited gives them that, so they can compete.”

Inside the greenhouse, Vincent takes interns through the process of tilapia breeding. He shows them how to check the gender of adult fish, transfer fingerlings from the incubator to a pond, and count the tiny fish for sale.

The greenhouse is hot and humid, although it maintains an even climate compared to outside. Under Vincent’s guidance, one of the interns, Bramwell, lowers a tray of fingerlings from the incubator into the tank. “Slowly, slowly,” Vincent warns. “They need to acclimatize to the new water. Let them swim out on their own.”