Togo: A woman fishmonger switches to fish farming

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Ablawa Apoin Togbeu was a fishmonger for several years at the fishing port of Lomé. Now she is switching to fish farming. “Before, I owned a pirogue that went to sea. But it is too much anxiety for nothing. I had a lot of losses. Now I get fish supply from a white man who sells me his fish”, she explains. Her supplier is a European who acquired the Togolese nationality through marriage, and operates a 15 meters long boat.

In 2011, she also decided to engage in fish farming. Mrs Togbeu built the fish farm “la canne à pêche” in her native village, Sevagan, a town about 30 kilometers from Lomé.

Mrs Togbeu never received any formal training in fish farming and therefore, she learned along the way, by trials and errors. With a tractor, she dug four ponds on her farm, which costed her about 5 million FCFA (€7,500). “I took a loan that I pay bit by bit – today I have not yet finished to reimburse it”, she says.

The beginning was not easy for Mrs Togbeu. She explains: “After digging the ponds, the next question was: where could I find the fish? I brought fish from the Lake, but it did not work. Also, I didn’t know you need to feed the fish, so they kept dying. And, whenever I was putting new fish in the water, villagers came at night to empty the pond. When I was coming to catch the fish, I couldn’t find anything”. At that time, she decided to hire a keeper. She recruited Koffi Tchiè. He lives permanently on the farm with his wife and his three year old child. “I am the guardian, night and day. I feed the fish three times per day and I also make the feed for the fish. My role is also to ensure that no one comes to take the fish from the ponds”, he explains.

In 2014, Mrs Togbeu participated to a training. During this session, she discovered the project for support to the agricultural sector (PASA), and, through that project, learned how to feed the fish. “PASA also gave me the fish fry. I put 2,000 [fry]in a pond. So, last year, I could fill two ponds but the other two remained empty because I didn’t find the fry”.

Mrs Togbeu also benefited from the PASA for getting subsidized fish food. She buys a bag of 20 kg of pellets at 5,000 FCFA (€7 EUR). On the market, the same bag is three times more expensive.

Mrs. Togbeu sells her fish to women fish smokers. She also sells her fish to hotels and restaurants in Lomé. “For women who come to buy on the spot here, I sell a kilo of fish 1,500 FCFA(€2.3). But for hotels in Lomé, I sell a kilo up to 2,500 FCFA (€3.8)”.

Fish farming is not easy. “Everything is difficult. Feeding the fish three times per day is not easy. Finding the ingredients for the feed is not easy. Making the feed is not easy. But where there is a will, there is a way”, she says. Yet, she sees a brighter future in fish farming and thus aims to expand her farm. “My goal is to redesign my ponds and dig other ponds to produce fry myself”, she confides.

Inoussa Maïga

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