For many years, it was practically taboo for women in this remote Msambweni village to fish for a living. It was considered a man’s job.
But a number of women in Makongeni are challenging this tradition and turning to mariculture or aquaculture.
What started in 2004 as a trial-and-error project is now seen as East Africa’s centre of excellence and a major project that could soon turn around the fortunes of an entire village — and community.
The Baraka Makongeni Group’s daily business revolves around fish farming. The stock is not just any fish, but two species — the milk fish (mwatiko) and mullet fish — which breed near the sea in mangrove swamps.
This is a process that requires patience, commitment, time, money and lots of teamwork, which the 20 women and two men have over the years learnt through experience and hard work.
Mariam Mwalimu, the group’s assistant chairperson, says they have made strides in reducing pressure on mangroves by embracing mariculture as an alternative source of livelihood.
Mangroves are breeding sites for the fish but they are being cut down.
The women have built five ponds, three are currently used to breed the mullet and milk fish until they are ready for the market.
They have also built three nursery ponds, where the fingerlings are kept for special care and attention, a process that takes two months.
It is at this critical stage at the hatchery that the women take time to study and understand the types of fingerlings they got from the sea.
“Unlike normal freshwater fish farming, we have to identify the right fingerlings to stock otherwise we would end up having predators and prey together,” Mwalimu says.
She says the idea to start fish farming next to the sea was due to dwindling stocks, especially the season when waves are particularly strong.
However, preserving the ponds during the rainy and windy seasons has been a tall order.
“When the rains come, mostly in May and August, we have to hire youths to transport sacks full of sand and build walls around the ponds to act as buffers, without which all our stock will be washed into the sea when it rains or when the tides are high,” Mwalimu says.
It happened once and the group was forced to start from scratch.
Makongeni soils are sandy and can hardly withstand erosion.
The upside is that the fish thrive in sandy soils, according to experts.
The process starts with the women setting out to the seashore to get the fingerlings, which has to be done at dawn.
“We get the fingerlings sometimes as far as Gazi, and have to use motorcycles at times to transport them. Reason being, most fingerlings, will survive for at least 30 minutes outside water. We don’t want to reach the nursery ponds with dead fingerlings and that is why speed is of the essence,” Fatuma Hamisi, the treasurer, says.
Harvesting is done twice a year — it takes two months for the fingerlings to grow, after which they are transferred to the main pond, where they take up to six months to fully mature.
Recently, a record 130 kilos of fish was harvested in less than two hours, bringing new meaning to the term generating income in the rural community.
The women earned about Sh50,000 — Sh20,000 went to labour, buying fish food, and maintenance of the ponds.
“We don’t pay members. We gave them a small fee to buy soap and milk and bank the rest of the money,” says Hamisi.
The food (wishwa), consists of maize, cassava, wheat husks, which are ground together by a special machine. The combination varies depending on whether the food is for the fingerlings or the grown fish.
“After three months, we normally change the diet and include ground and shredded coconut flex, omena and at times cow blood, if omena is not available, since it is expensive and food eaten by humans. We feed them twice per day – at 10am and 4pm,” says Mwalimu.
The food is expensive, each sack costs Sh1,500. When the economy is in bad shape, as is the case currently, the price shoots to Sh2,000 for a 25kg bag of feed. The food is purchased in Mombasa and Ukunda.
On average, the women get about 300 to 1,000 fingerlings. At about two months, when the fish start to grow, that they can differentiate the breeds.
Transferring the fingerlings from the nursery pond involves counting, recording and tabulating the stocks, a detailed exercise that requires attentiveness.
“Fingerling collection is a serious undertaking because this is what will determine the type of harvest we will have at the end of three months.”
It is done using mosquito nets, due to lack of proper fishing gear.
Through mariculture, the women have been able to sustain their families and protect the ecosystem, through mangrove conservation. The women have a number of nurseries where they grow mangroves.
The group has installed drainage pipes on each pond to guard against excess water flowing into the ponds. The pipes also help regulate salinity and temperatures.
“The water should not be too salty and too hot. We have a machine that checks all that. Once we measure, we use the pipes to get the right temperature, water amount and salinity levels,” says Mwalimu.
Nets are attached to the pipes to ensure only the right and quality breeds are in the ponds, and act as a sieve.
During harvest time the women don’t use the mosquito nets but normal fishing nets.
When the women started the project, the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute offered to feed the fish.
“Unfortunately, to date we don’t have a solid market and sell the fish to the villagers and individuals. The good thing is that when the harvest is ready and in plenty, we store it in coolers that we acquired through another programme with some NGO,” says Mwalimu.
Members are sometimes forced to hawk the fish if they don’t get clients on time.
“We go round town selling our fish. At times in the village someone may insist that instead of the usual Sh200 per kilogram, they will only give Sh100. In such cases we incur losses, but there’s nothing much we can do about it,” says Mwalimu.
The group, which was registered in 2006, lends money to members, who repay it with interest.
They also sell the fingerlings to groups in Kibokoni and Jomvu in Mombasa, and Kilifi. Each fingerling goes for Sh13.
Kwetu Training Centre, the organisation that initially helped the women jump-start the process, says communities living near mangroves are highly vulnerable.
“That being their critical lifestyle, if it is destroyed, it will affect them as most are fishermen and poverty levels are high,” says mariculture coordinator Muli Brendan.
Having worked with the Makongeni group since 2004, in issues revolving community empowerment, livelihoods and conservation, Kwetu Centre, together with the locals, had to look for alternative livelihoods.
“Our idea was to work with coastal communities bordering the ocean because of the critical ecosystem, especially the mangrove ecosystem, where they based their livelihood,” says Muli.
Cutting mangrove was the community’s main livelihood but this led to dwindling fish stocks as mangroves serve as breeding sites.
“We mobilised them to form the Community Forest Association. Back then we did not have any CFA in the Coast like the Mau one or in other regions. Now we have three. In Kilifi, Mombasa and Gazi,” Muli adds
After designing the project and linking the women with the government and other stakeholders, between 2004 and 2010, Kwetu continued to create linkages and opportunities for empowerment.
“We trained about 30 members and along the way, they got some funding from the Kenya Coastal Development Project,”
Some of the challenges include sustainability and culture, where women do not want to be on the forefront in management and handling finances.
Also, the legal framework in which such organisations operate, lack of government policy driven support, market, feeds and seeds.
“When we started, we would use about Sh40,000 for labour, materials, and other issues. We constructed eight, 12 by 10 metres ponds, although as at now, they have been combined and are 15 by 20 metres,” says Muli.
In the formative and development stages, another organisation, Recomap, says the group, was linked with experts from Tanzania and the Philippines, where such schemes have been successful.
The group was used as a model and some members taken to Mtwara, Tanzania, to learn how the farming is done with greater success.
Kemfri, which was involved in the technical aspect of assisting the group, provided technical knowledge, and contributed in pond construction.
“When we came in 2014, we tried to help them set up commercially viable ponds and ensured they were well stocked. We assisted in buying feeds and also taught them how to locally prepare the feeds, which was cheaper than buying, and contributed to 60 per cent of their running costs. This was a way of sustainability,” says Kemfri research officer Caroline Wanjiru.
She says if well stocked, the milk fish take at least five to six months to fully develop. A fish weighs 250-300 grammes (table size), but in some cases, depending on the feed, this does not necessarily mean the fish have reached maturity.
“They harvest twice a year and there are good returns for their investment if they consider all that they learnt. We also made them understand that buying feed is one thing while feeding in itself is another,” says Wanjiru
The group was educated on monthly monitoring of fish growth, and how to keep records as the mariculture venture was a flagship project.
“We teach them to run the enterprise as a business and not a project, so that they fully own it,” adds Wanjiru.