News
Stop Illegal Fishing gains a new momentum
After six years of slowly growing an international network of partners and developing the expertise and knowledge required to overcome illegal fishing in Africa, Stop Illegal Fishing (SIF) now becomes a legal entity as a not for profit society. Members of the SIF network from all over Africa, and the world, were invited to attend and participate in designing the future of SIF at the inaugural annual general meeting of the new entity, held at the Mokolodi Nature Reserve in Gaborone, Botswana on the 21st and 22nd of March 2013. The meeting was supported by the Partnership for African Fisheries of the NEPAD Planning and Coordination Agency.
Those in attendance finalised the constitution, which was formally approved to be the guiding legal framework of the organisation and agreed to legally register Stop Illegal Fishing as a Society in Botswana. The new constitution outlines the purpose of SIF as: "to strengthen cooperation and coordination between governments and partners and to support the African Union’s and the NEPAD Planning and Coordination Agency’s agendas and other community, national, regional and international processes to stop IUU fishing in African waters." This new purpose, builds on the past work and experiences of SIF, ensuring that it is well aligned to African agendas while allowing for the group to tackle more focused objectives to achieve this outcome.
A very strong Executive Committee was elected with all members possessing a wealth of expertise and experience in various aspects of the African fisheries sector and in combatting Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. Congratulations go out to the Executive Committee members who are:
Chairperson: Geoffrey Nanyaro
Vice Chairpersons: Manuel Castiano and Dedi Seraphin
Vice Secretary: Markus Burgener
Treasurer: Sandy Davies
Executive Member: Gerard Domingue
Executive Member: Marcel Kroese
The SIF Coordinators were also selected with Per Erik Bergh as the Coordinator and Mark Ssemakula as the Deputy Coordinator.
All at Stop Illegal Fishing would like to thank those who attended this historic event and we look forward to working with all the partners of SIF in this new chapter ‚and to continue our shared efforts to combat IUU fishing in Africa.