The work we do.
Building infrastructure for collective impact is not just one organisation’s work. That is why we view our work with every partner as part of a greater whole. The achievements of one, are passed on to the next, and so on.
See a case study of our work with COBI below.
Building digital infrastructure for SDG14
with fishing communities in Latin America & the Caribbean
The Challenge
Scaling the impacts of one marine conservation organisation to reach 300x more fishers in the next five years than they have reached in the first 20 years of the organisation’s existence.
The Outcome
A mobile-first strategy for building a distributed digital ecosystem that mobilises marine conservation innovations and capital while centering the fishers’ needs.
“Oceans and fisheries continued to support the global population’s economic, social and environmental needs while suffering unsustainable depletion, environmental deterioration and carbon dioxide saturation and acidification. Current efforts to protect key marine environments and small-scale fishers and invest in ocean science are not yet meeting the urgent need to protect this vast, fragile resource.”
As front line participants in ocean conservation, small-scale fishers bear an unreasonable burden: they are relied upon as both stewards of the ocean and contributors to local and domestic economies, yet they are the first to feel the impacts of market disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic brought these issues into sharp relief; fishers first lost international customers as supply chains were disrupted by lockdown mandates, and then lost domestic customers as businesses were shuttered and tourism collapsed.
With thousands of coastal communities in Mexico representing over 300,000 small-scale fishers, COBI knew that they needed an approach to better leverage technology to rapidly scale their impact within Mexico, and across Latin America and the Caribbean. It was with this in mind that COBI invited a partnership with Armillaria.
Through stakeholder interviews, participatory design sessions with fishers, and deep dives with the COBI team, we identified the opportunity to accelerate the success of marine conservation initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean by enhancing coherence, capacity, and cooperation between invested communities, cooperatives, civil society organisations, governments, corporations and consumers.
Innovacion Azul (Blue Innovations) as this initiative is now known, is using the PescaData app as the thin end of the wedge—a way to bridge the digital divide impacting small-scale fishing communities, streamlining fishers’ reporting obligations, strengthening the operational capacity of fishing cooperatives, increasing the shareability of solutions to common problems, and encouraging communication and trade between fishers in neighboring communities.
Our work to date has covered three major areas:
Business modeling - incorporating our design principles into an equitable business model that focuses on the benefits of digital logbooks to fishing cooperatives as an initial go-to-market strategy.
Usability and utility - re-architecting PescaData, upgrading the security and scalability of the platform, building community through asks and offers, and integrating compliance and management tools for cooperative administrators. fishing permits, compliance reporting, and management of fishers and boats.
Impact indicators - connecting fishing logs to SDG and FAO indicators, educating fishers and cooperatives on how their actions are supporting a larger purpose, and making visible how fishers’ actions and innovations positively impact the coastal oceans.
Thank you to all the wonderful photographers who created the images on this page. In order of appearance from top to bottom:
Naja Bertolt Jensen (images 1 and 2)
Elba Lopez (images 4 and 5)
Bebastian Pena Lambarri (image 6)