Environmental awareness rises on shores of Lake Victoria

By Ebba Kalondo Dec 17, 2005, 18:06 GMT

Mbita, Kenya - Takawiri Island looks exactly as you would imagine a picturesque, isolated African fishing village - gulls fly overhead, groups of women clad in bright African prints sing as they repair fishing nets on the shores of Lake Victoria, Africa's largest.

John Onyango fled to the region as a refugee in 1992 to work as a fisherman after his family lost their land and their few belongings in the wake of brutal ethnic clashes in Kenya's Rift Valley province in 1991.

The locals have always considered the world's second largest freshwater lake an economic and dietary safety net when all other opportunities dry up.

But the lake, heaving from the effects of a rapidly increasing population and overfishing by more than 54,000 fishing boats a day, is in dire straits and in need of help.

The lack of coordinated policies by the three countries that share the lake's resources has spurred a small movement including the Takawiri Fishermen's Union (TFU) led by John Onyango.

A network of organisations dubbed the Living Lakes is helping fishermen like John secure their future and that of the lake by establishing saving clubs and introducing new fishing methods to maintain fish levels and the lake's fragile balance.

TFU convinced the island's 1,000 fishermen to demand a common price from agents waiting with refrigerated trucks on the mainland for their catch.

Before, agents forced the illiterate fishermen to sell their catches individually at giveaway prices.

The fishermen now pool the cash value of one kilogramme of their daily catch into a savings account and another kilogramme into a fund that paid for the first school building and dispensary on the island.

It also pays the teachers' salaries, and the young unemployed men who clean the some three-ton daily common catch. The fund also gives members smalls loans.

'When I came here, the houses you see were grass huts, not like the mabati (corrugated iron) houses you see now and people lived from one catch to the next,' Onyango says.

Despite the great improvements John and his co-members have made in their standard of living, they remain desperately poor. The water levels of Lake Victoria are receding annually as global warming takes its toll reducing the catch from year to year.

Beach communities on the Kenyan side of the lake are also hard hit by HIV/AIDS. Nyanza province where the lake is situated, has the highest prevalence of the disease in the entire country.

Lake Victoria is the equivalent of a major trans-border highway connecting Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania where fishermen ply the waters in search of better opportunities and bigger catches.

The odds stacked up by nature and human exploitation are high, but Takawira's fishermen are bent on convincing the inhabitants on some of the lake's 700 islands that its future and their survival are intertwined. That requires fundamental changes in the way they treat their natural supermarket and employer.