Ghana, like many West African countries, has long faced challenges with fisheries monitoring, control and surveillance. The entire region has a longstanding vulnerability to being used as a landing or transit point in the supply of illegally caught fish, which threatens food security and economic stability in the hundreds of fishing communities along the coast.
Prior to employing Vessel Viewer as part of a pilot program, Intelligence-Led Fisheries Port Controls, Ghana had no formal mechanism for conducting risk assessments of ships seeking to land catch at the country’s ports, according to Shamira Abdulai, a senior fisheries manager in the Fisheries Commission of Ghana.
The tool, coupled with implementation of the Port State Measures Agreement, has since enabled officials here to conduct risk assessments on every foreign-flagged vessel calling at Ghana’s ports, Abdulai said. Ghanaian officials leveraged Vessel Viewer’s full suite of features, including the ability to look at each vessel’s location, speed, intended port call, prior identities and activity history, and other ports it had visited. This afforded them a full view of each ship’s likely risk of IUU activity.Â
In one case in 2023, Ghanaian officials used Vessel Viewer to detect gaps in the automatic identification system (AIS) transmissions of a reefer headed to the port of Tema from Angolan waters. This set off a chain of investigation, along with communication with other governments in the region through regional monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) task forces in West and South Africa.Â
First, officials reviewed the vessel’s advance request for entry to port documents and saw that the AIS gaps corresponded with a transshipment that occurred in the Angola exclusive economic zone. Vessel Viewer also helped them discover the donor vessel identified in the transshipment documents went dark on AIS during the operation. Ghanaian officials shared this information with the West African Task Force, the MCS arm of the Fisheries Committee for the West Central Gulf of Guinea, and its regional MCS center, which allowed neighboring country Côte d’Ivoire to highlight that more transshipment operations had taken place between the same reefer and additional fishing vessels during other gaps in AIS transmissions.Â
Through interregional cooperation between the West Africa Task Force and the Southern Africa Development Community MCS Coordination Centre, contacts were made with the donor vessel’s flag State, Cameroon, and the coastal State, Angola, for information cross-checking purposes. The result was confirmation of unauthorized transshipment and other infractions, which prompted sanctions against both the reefer and the donor vessels–five vessels in total– and an improved understanding of how these IUU events can occur. Â
Abdulai said Ghana will continue to use Vessel Viewer to support PSMA implementation and other monitoring, control and surveillance activities, and will work with Global Fishing Watch and TMT to further hone the tool to best detect and prevent IUU fishing off West Africa.
