Women and the Seafood Industry — A Case for Fishcoin and a Personal Mission
On International Women’s Day it is important to recognise the contribution women make to the seafood industry. Although they play a lessor role in the capture of fish they play the major role in the processing of fish into value added seafood. Indeed as much as we gender identify fishing with men (fisherman or fishermen) we could easily do the same for processing with women — processorwoman or processorwomen.
Of the sparse data we have, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that one in two people in the seafood industry is a woman. Therefore a lot more needs to be done to recognise the contribution of women, and going forward, data dissagregation by gender in the seafood sector will help formulate gender-aware policies. This is critical because of the more than one billion people in the world estimated to be living in extreme poverty, 70 percent are women.
Women in developing nations like Indonesia dominate the floors of processing facilities. They work five and half days a week and legal take home pay can be as low as US$120 a month. Despite this, mobile phone ownership is high and increasing with the falling cost of phones — especially smart phones. This is important as it is not only a social outlet, the phone is an important source of general information, women’s health matters, education, financial services, and a far more effective whistle to blow to the authorities with about labour abuses or illegal activities.
Ms. Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General, United Nations, Message for Mobile World Congress
I personally believe the Equals Partnership dedicated to bridge digital gender gap could be the most well positioned initiative to positively impact the Global Goals and achieve gender equality. The partnership is led by the International Telecommunications Union, UN Women, International Trade Center, UN University and GSMA. The partnership is well structured in approach to achieving meaningful impact through Access, Skills and Leadership coalitions. The GSMA Connected Women Report provides an insight into the implications of narrowing the digital gender gap.
At Eachmile Technologies, we are taking a digital and blockchain integrated approach to fish trading. Leveraging blockchain to gather gender data could help provide transparency to social, environmental and economic issues. The Fishcoin ecosystem will enable trade incentives for sustainable practices across fishing and aquaculture supply chains. Fishcoin will help provide incentives for the needed data aggregation to increase transparency and accuracy in the analysis of gender issues across the seafood industry. Blockchain’s capabilities enable us to tell stories and present verified claims to consumers to help educate them on responsible consumption of seafood from responsible sources.
In forming the Fishcoin ecosystem, we aim to partner with telecom and technology brands to enable access to mobile connectivity and mobile money for women across the seafood supply chain, in fishing and fish farming communities. We aim to establish learning partnerships to enable access to locally appropriate skills development tools to provide digital, business and financial literacy training. We also aim to collaborate with partners to enable access to STEAM education for women and girls in local fishing and fish farming communities beginning in the United States, Vietnam and Indonesia.
The scale of our opportunity is only limited by our ability to reach communities. Technology enables rapid acceleration in reach. In a report commissioned by Facebook and compiled by the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, internet connectivity grew 8.3% over the past year, with a 65.1% increase in low-income countries. In these countries, the average cost of a 500MB mobile broadband connection fell from 12.1% of monthly income in 2017 to 10.0% in 2018, a 17.3% cost reduction. However the report also found that the gender gap in Internet inclusion is still far too pervasive. On average across the indexed countries, men are 33.5% more likely to have Internet access than women, and this gap is substantially more pronounced in lower-income countries. More men have access to the Internet than women in 69 out of the 86 countries included in the index.
