Blue Venture’s Rare Pride campaign on the Andavadoaka Coast in Madagascar will ensure the health of the world’s third largest coral reef by working with local fishers and communities to protect juvenile fish species by eliminating the use of beach seine nets and the practice of poison fishing. This is a success story from that campaign.

During the month of March, Campaign Manager Gildas Andriamalala made plans to organize three leadership and governance training workshops for the leaders of 24 villages in his campaign site. The workshops were delayed, however, in order to accomodate an election being held which would appoint two leaders to the Velondriake MPA (marine protected area) Management Committee.  These individuals would in turn be the designated village leaders on marine matters.

As Blue Ventures helped to facilitate the election, Gildas used the opportunity to stimulate discussion among the community and ask community members to make public statements in regard to local law (known as Dina) as it relates to marine matters.  As a result of these discussions, Gildas came up with the idea to produce a panel for each community that represents what the Dina means to them.  This panel would then be placed by the waterfront of the community, in clear view, to inform everyone of the law and to emphasize that it is being enforced.

“As you can see from the pictures, none of the panels are the same,” Gildas said. “They all had their own idea in every village. Some of them didn’t really care about attractiveness in terms of presentation and writing, but some did it very well.”

This was, in social marketing terms, a brilliant idea. Producing and posting the panels would be a minute task for the community, but it would create significant buy-in and ownership of the campaign.

“The most important thing is that the messages are out and observed by all of the community. For example, in Lamboara, they wrote down everything included in their Dina on the panel,” said Gildas.

Lamboara panel translation: “Velondriake protected area. I’m Vezo; this is why I stop people from doing these destructive practices: Using poison fishing in all regions, buying fish caught from poison fishing, using gear that kill juveniles (mosquito net, gillnet, etc), using beach seine, doing coral overturning and coral destruction, hunting turtle and dolphin, poaching all type of reserve (octopus, sea cucumber, fish, etc), cutting mangroves without authorization, littering along the beach.”

Agnolignoly panel translation: “Stop poison fishing, beach seining, and coral overturning.  Fine: 10,000 ar/person if caught.  I’M VEZO”

Ankindranoke panel translation: “Stop beach seine, poison fishing, and coral overturning. Anyone caught poison fishing pays about a hundred thousand ariary. It is also forbidden to do night diving. It is also forbidden to collect poisoned fish floating  on the surface. The broad community is also allowed to catch people with the committee members.”

Tampolove panel translation: “Go fish in the sea but don’t use poison, beach seine and coral overturning. It’s good to protect marine resources for our future generations’ living.”

Vatoavo panel translation: “‘Velondriake Area’ ISONY- VATOAVO. It is forbidden here to do beach seine and poison fishing. It is forbidden to cut mangrove without permission. Fine: 40-000Ar or 40000Ar”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Pride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.