Joanna Toole Award (2022) - Uganda Junior Rangers (Uganda)
Project Summary
Uganda Junior Rangers: Community-Led Management of End-of-Life Fishing Gear and ALDFG in Lake Victoria, Uganda
This project is designed to address ALDFG along various fish landing sites around Lake Victoria, Uganda; analyze ALDFG impacts on the health of Lake Victoria fisheries; educate the local community on ALDFG; map ALDFG waste and disposal sites; and recover damaged, old and discarded fishing nets left in and around Lake Victoria or on its islands.
The Junior Rangers initially focused the study on four centrally located fish trading towns around Lake Victoria: Jinja, Mukono, Kampala, and Entebbe. Additional research was done on two rural fishing coastal towns in Masaka on Lake Victoria and in Nakasongola on Lake Albert, and the Junior Rangers are now expanding their ALDFG research, mapping and recovery efforts to fishing sites on parts of Lake Victoria including the town of Busia, Kenya, and the town of Mwanza, Tanzania. In each town, efforts are made to recover and recycle ALDFG wherever possible.
The ALDFG landing sites are categorized into three levels, according to the severity of the ALDFG issue in each corresponding community. The study also includes fisher interviews to ascertain the primary causes for gear loss/discard and to gain the perspective of those most impacted by ALDFG, as well as public education campaigns with information boards placed in each landing site at the net collection kiosks to highlight the damage that ALDFG does to the environment and to the economic stability of fishing-reliant towns. Additionally, the Junior Rangers held workshops for local fishers and community members to raise awareness of ALDFG and its impacts. The education component of the project has so far reached over 100,000 people locally, and more than 2 million people via various media campaigns, among them the Berlin-based DW TV, in Germany.
Through volunteer recruitment and community action at 6 net collection kiosks, approximately 88,184 pounds of fishing gear have been collected from Lake Victoria and its shorelines. The Uganda Junior Rangers team has worked with the Global Ghost Gear Initiative as well as other partners One Earth - One Ocean from Germany, Brainbow (Netherlands), Ghost Network (Portugal), LindBland Wanderlust Fund (USA), Hamline University (USA), and Glen Mattsing of Circular Ocean (Sweden) and Precious Plastic (Malaysia) to provide expert guidance to create a circular system of collecting, recovering, and upcycling all ALDFG gear in Uganda.
