Following on from earlier exchanges on promoting ocean literacy in conjunction with World Ocean Day, Mundus maris Vice President, Prof. Stella Williams, was invited by the Director of Fisheries, Mrs. Kadijatu Jalloh, and Mrs Ranita A.S. Koroma, Environmental Safeguards Specialist of the Freetown Emergency Recovery Project, Ministry of Finance, to meet with interested personalities in order to present key aspects of the work of the organisation.
The visit to Freetown took place between 27 October and 8 November 2019. The Ministry of Fisheries hosted the key seminar with the Minister of Fisheries, the Honourable Mrs. Emma Kowa-Jalloh, and the Deputy Minister of Fisheries, the Honourable Mr. Ibrahim Turay, in attendance. Other participants came from the Fisheries Department, the University of Sierra Leone - such as Prof. P.A.T. Showers - and civil society organisations.
The seminar served, among others, to share examples of what may help advancing ocean literacy, including a teaching kit developed for and with the FAO's Fridtjof Nansen Project for West African schools.
The introduction of the small-scale fisheries academy also triggered some interest as much of the country's fisheries are in that category and taking place in remote areas where providing proper support services remains a challenge as a result of long periods of instability in conjunction with the civil war. More recently the Ebola crisis reverted earlier economic advances and brought effective monitoring, control and surveillance against pouching by industrial fleets to its knees. All actors in the country are now striving to regain lost territory and make fisheries a productive part of the economy again.
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