Peskas: The fisheries monitoring system making waves in Asia and Africa

A short film on the success of the Peskas fisheries monitoring system in Timor Leste is now available in six languages – a reflection of efforts to scale up its use in Africa and bring the work to audiences worldwide.

Here’s the English version:

Supported by a number of different partners and funders (see below) since its inception in 2017, Peskas allows users to monitor small-scale fisheries in the SE Asian country in near-real time. Its publicly available online dashboard provides information and analytics on fish catch composition, fishing grounds and more, with the aiming of supporting stakeholder from fishers to policymakers to preserve, restore and regenerate the country’s fisheries.

As you’ll learn in the film, Peskas analyzes and visualizes fisheries data collected by enumerators when fishers come to shore, combining it with data from GPS devices mounted on artisanal fishing boats. Peskas has been used by the government in Timor-Leste as its official fisheries monitoring system since 2020.

The success of Peskas in Timor Leste means it is now being scaled up in Africa, with work underway in Kenya, Zanzibar, Mozambique and Malawi, via the Asia-Africa BlueTech Superhighway project led by WorldFish and funded by UK International Development.

To support the roll out and awareness-raising more generally, versions of the Peskas film are now available in English, Swahili, Chichewa, Portuguese, Spanish and Tetum. It means over a quarter of the world can learn about Peskas in a language they speak.

In Zanzibar, nearly 100 vessels are already being tracked and enumerators are being trained across 20 sites to collect landings data. In Kenya the data pipeline from 35 sites has been established and government data is being integrated. In Mozambique, the first monitoring system up and running is through a partnership with Lúrio University.  In Malawi, the system and dashboard are operational and online, integrating government data from official catch monitoring, and additional pilot data collection combined with high resolution vessel tracks. https://malawi.peskas.org/. There will be more to share on this work in 2025.

Watch Peskas – Big Data for Small-scale fisheries in Spanish

Watch Peskas – Big Data for Small-scale fisheries in Portuguese

Watch Peskas – Big Data for Small-scale fisheries in Swahili

Watch Peskas – Big Data for Small-scale fisheries in Tetum

Watch Peskas – Big Data for Small-scale fisheries in Chichewa

Peskas was developed with the support of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Jakarta, Pelagic Data Systems, and the CGIAR Initiative on Aquatic Foods. Scaling up Peskas to four African countries is supported by UK International Development.