Fish farming as a process to ensure food security, provide household income, preserve the environment and reduce the number of sexual assaults and the spread of HIV. While at first glance it may seem incomprehensible how fish farming could bring about such a revolution and intervene so radically across this range of issues, that is precisely what is happening in the basin of Lake Victoria, the largest freshwater reserve in the world.

The importance of fishing in Africa

To understand what is happening in the lakeside areas of central Africa, one must first examine the economic and social situation in the villages that border the lake. In Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, the three African countries that border the lake basin, fishing sustains over 4 million people, being the primary — if not the only — source of income for a large part of the villages' inhabitants.

However, population growth in the region has accelerated dramatically in recent years, with an annual growth rate of 3.5 per cent. This exponential rise in population has had two immediate consequences. The first, predictably, has been a decline in fish stocks. The second, by contrast, has been an increasingly widespread and uncontrolled proliferation of the phenomenon known in the Luo language as jaboya, which literally translates as "sex for fish".

Why fish farming and overcoming abuse are connected

Since women are responsible for selling fish rather than catching it, in order to secure their share of the catch to display on market stalls, they are increasingly — particularly given the decline in raw supply — resorting to prostitution. The exact number of women who offer sexual favours to fishermen in exchange for fish cannot be determined. What is certain, however, according to data provided by the NGO World Neighbors, is that a quarter of the lakeside population is HIV-positive — and that infection rates along the lake's shores exceed the national averages of all three countries by 5 per cent. The principal reason is precisely the now systemic spread of jaboya.

It is within this context — in which abuse of women, demographic problems and environmental damage all feature — that the spread of fish farming intervenes as a bulwark against the region's social, health and economic deterioration. This is revealed by an investigation published by the outlet Ozy, which gathered testimonies from women who have transformed their lives through fish farming, since aquaculture gives them the opportunity to earn an income without depending on men's catches. And the effects of the spread of fish farming have produced excellent results in under five years.

In the district of North Nyakach, Kenya, home to 42,000 people, HIV infection rates have fallen by 20 per cent and household income has increased by 32 per cent since World Neighbors launched a programme encouraging fish farming. In Tanzania, FAO data show that freshwater fish farming doubled in a single year, and in Uganda the organisation Katende Harambe Rural Urban Training Center is investing in fish farming carried out in wooden crates and water containers, so as to allow even the poorest sections of the population to start their own fish-farming operations. There has also been a marked reduction in intensive fishing, with the waters of Lake Victoria — precious and vital to an entire region — among the primary beneficiaries.