Gunjur Beach lies an hour’s drive from the Gambian capital of Banjul, along a stretch of wide open road and dirt tracks with few cars. In this West African coastal village, small-scale fishing is the bedrock of life. There are fishers, haulers, net menders, boat builders, fish driers. And they are all men.
To get a fuller picture of who contributes to this fishery, you have to walk past the landing sites, right to the back of the beach. Here, you’ll find the women, singing as they slice, dice and prepare freshly caught fish, which will later be sold or smoked on large grills loaded with firewood. Young children play in the sand and some women have babies swaddled to their backs.
Gunjur is emblematic of the often hidden nature of women’s work in the fishing industry more globally. Of the 113 million people who work in small-scale and subsistence fishing, about 45 million are women, according to the latest assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Policy design, however, doesn’t properly consider women. The FAO assessment found that the majority of countries failed to collect gender-specific data that properly reflected women’s roles in official statistics, and that women were largely unaccounted for in government schemes to help out the sector, such as social security benefits.
There are of course many roles in the fishing industry. The FAO notes that more men are recorded as fishers than women. As for gleaning – catching seafood in shallow coastal waters, often by hand – women carry out more of this activity than men, the FAO found in another report. In aquaculture, women are estimated to account for 70% of the total workforce.
“The fact that they are not the fishers, or the fish that they catch is not counted because it goes directly to feeding the family or are sold to neighbours… are just some of the things that makes the role of women almost invisible,” explains Dr Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood, a lecturer in sustainable development at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
A 2021 study examined how gender influenced roles in the small-scale lake fisheries of Malawi, East Africa. Jobs that could be “done by anyone” were often assigned to women – namely carrying and processing fish. They were considered not to have the strength or know-how to fill more visible roles such as captaining a boat or being part of a commercial fishing fleet.
In Nigeria, women not only sell the fish but are involved in net-mending and provisioning for fishing trips. This work often goes unrecognised, and the result is that women are often overlooked when it comes to policy decisions that would ultimately benefit them, says Okafor-Yarwood.
In Asia, as in Africa, subsidies for fishers are normally passed on through boat registrations. Yet nearly all the boats are owned by men. “People who do not own boats do not become members [of fishing associations],” says Okafor-Yarwood. “So it is very important that women are also considered as fishers and included in these associations, and also in discussions with the government on fisheries management.”