Starting a Community Engagement Project, from Federico our newest Intern!

The Maru has been monitoring the Mazukuhunju Fishing Village for over 7 years, weighing the fish that they caught everyday in order to get an idea of how many fish had been taken from the lake. In spite of this monitoring when I  arrived to The Maru I realized that everything we knew from the fishing village was based on rumours or casual conversations with the people around Kande, so i decided that we needed to do a characterization of the village and ask villagers their challenges while they are fishing and living in this village in order to be able to create a project together with the community that can both increase the amount of fish in  the lake and improve their quality of life.

So far we have done over 22 interviews and the results have been better than expected, the people from the village, have been very receptive to us asking them questions about their way of life, and we have been able to get to know more about their life style, their organization as a community,  their main challenges in their fishing activities, their opinions about other stakeholders in the lake, their feelings about overfishing, among other things.

Once the interviews are over, we will be able to characterize the  demographics of the village, and also I will be designing a project with the information gathered with the aims of decreasing the overfishing in the lake while also helping the villagers to have a better way of life.

As a divemaster and an environmental lawyer it has been an amazing learning experience to come to The Maru and learn more about different scientific disciplines, like aquatic biology, learning more about the cichilids, how to to do underwater surveys, monitor water quality in the rivers, and also complementing my social science knowledge by getting to know the people from the fiishing village and their way of living, and learning how to create a community engagement project by just doing it. Also just the fact of being living in Malawi , right next to the Lake in a beautiful place like Kande has been wonderful.

Starting a Community Engagement Project, from Federico our newest Intern!