tWilfred Poggenpoel, 59, is a fisherman from Lambert’s Bay, a picturesque town 170 miles north of Cape Town, popular with surfers and home to 17,000 breeding pairs of Cape Gannets. Five years ago she made the decision to join a virtual market called Abalobiwhich allows fishermen like him to sell their catch directly to restaurants, retailers and consumers through a custom app.
“I get a better price and now I can sell more species,” he says. “I bought a 60 horsepower engine that I would never have been able to afford before. “I have bought a second boat.” She joined, she says, because she didn’t want to spend all day walking around town in the sun trying to sell fish. “My quality of life has improved. I have even been able to help some older people in the community.”
Abalobi (meaning fisherman in isiXhosa, one of South Africa’s official languages) is a non-profit technology organization working to help small-scale fishers who make up the majority of the South African fishing industry but are traditionally financially excluded. her.
There are three applications at the heart of the platform. The Fishers app, which Poggenpoel uses, allows fishermen to upload details of their daily catch to a database. The Marketplace app then shows restaurants, hotels and customers at home what’s available and allows them to purchase fresh, fully traceable line-caught fish directly from the people who caught it. The Monitor app takes data provided by fishermen and allows scientists to better manage fishing and fish populations.
“We buy about 100kg of fish each week through Abalobi,” says Kerry Kilpin, executive chef of two restaurants at the Steenberg wine estate in Cape Town. “It is not more expensive than other providers and it is “Much cooler.”
The fish, which are placed on ice when caught, are taken from the boats to a central distribution center where they are cleaned, packaged and delivered to customers within 24 hours. Purchases can be made in the app and fishermen receive payment within 48 hours.
Cape Town is surrounded by ocean, but Norwegian salmon and Mozambican prawns still feature on many restaurant menus. The app has allowed Kilpin to change what it offers customers.
“We use gold a lot,” he says. “It used to be something no one wanted. A fisherman’s fish that was sold in bunches at very low prices. But it is a spectacular fish, very versatile, small, delicate and with a pleasant flavor.”
Poggenpoel used to travel around Lambert Bay whipping bream at bargain prices. Now it is his daily bread. Abalobi’s focus on the species has also provided work for local women, who have been trained to prepare sea bream (and other fish).
“I used to work on a potato farm, in the wind and rain,” says Amelia Shoshola. “But this is much better. On a good day I can earn 300 rand (£13) for a few hours of work.”
Because bream can only be caught by anglers, it remains abundant.
Abalobi now works with more than 1,600 fishermen in communities around the South African coast, and its technology is used by partner organizations in 12 other countriesincluding Chile, Madagascar, Croatia and Ireland.
It was co-founded in 2015 by Serge Raemaekers, a fisheries researcher then working at the University of Cape Town. He worked in collaboration with Abongile Ngqongwa, a fisheries manager, and Nico Waldeck, a fisherman turned community activist from Lambert’s Bay.
“I was always involved in politics,” Waldeck says. “But when apartheid ended, I realized that I didn’t care about politics, but about communities. And my community was a community of fishermen.”
The first version of Abalobi focused on data collection, and Waldeck convinced fishermen that it was in their best interest to record (on smartphones provided by the platform) every fish they caught. Fishermen could use the data to apply for bank loans, he says, or renew fishing permits.
“Our starting point is not the chef or the dish,” says Raemaekers. “It’s about finding ways to build trust with these fishermen and women who have so much knowledge, information and data in their heads.”
In 2018 it began using that data to create the market in real time.
Kilpin was the first chef to purchase fish through Abalobi: 7kg of sea bream caught in Lambert’s Bay. Within two years, Abalobi was selling in 350 restaurants in the Cape. The Covid pandemic halted that expansion, but also meant Abalobi opened the market to retailers and consumers.
“It’s not about buying sustainable seafood that has some kind of blue or green marking in a way that works in formalized fisheries like the EU,” says Raemaekers. “Transposing that idea to the global south has many unintended consequences on social justice. “It is best to support a disintegrated segment of our society, like the South African fishing community.”
Waldeck is now working on a system that will allow the community to benefit even more by keeping some of the fish caught.
“(With Abalobi) we get a better price for fishermen, which is fantastic,” he says. “But that same fish has important nutritional value for Lambert’s Bay.”
She spent the past year running a food security project in which the platform buys part of the catch from fishermen (and pays women to clean and freeze it) before selling it back to the community at low prices. “At the moment we are subsidizing it (partially). But once we have come up with a system that can break even, we will implement it elsewhere.”
Meanwhile, Poggenpoel has more immediate ambitions. “I want to find a skipper and crew for my second boat and connect it to the Abalobi system,” he says. “I want to grow. “That’s all my motivation.”
Raemaekers has equally impressive plans. “This started as a citizen science project,” he says. “But it has become so much more. “It has the potential to redefine the way we all interact with the sea.”
