Original Story Published by: Dan Dickinson for UN News
(Above) Fisherwomen like Falmata Mboh Ali (right) hard at work on Lake Chad, which has shrunk to a tenth of its original size over the past decades leaving dwindling stocks of fish.
It’s eight o’clock in the morning and fifty-year-old Falmata Mboh Ali paddles her small dugout canoe to the shores of a tributary of Lake Chad in Bol, a small town 100 miles north of the capital of Chad, N’Djamena.
In her nets she has perhaps fifty fish, a good enough catch, given she started fishing just five hours earlier. But, it is not sufficient to feed her eleven children.
“I can sell this fish and use that money to buy grain to feed my family,” she said, “but the grain doesn’t go far. I have been fishing for twenty years and it is becoming more difficult to catch fish.”
Fishing has traditionally sustained communities in the Lake Chad Basin area, supporting nearly 30 million people living along its shores in Chad, but also Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger.
However, the once huge lake which covered 250,000 km2 has now shrunk to one tenth of its original size, largely due to unsustainable water management and the corrosive effects of climate change.
With fish now more scarce, and fishermen needing to travel further to find them, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has stepped in to offer support.
“We have been helped by a project which has supplied new nets, so my catch is increasing,” said Falmata Mboh Ali, “so I am hopeful that my family’s life can improve.”
The precarious situation local people now find themselves in has been compounded by insecurity related to the activities of the Islamist Boko Haram terrorist group, across the whole Lake Chad region.
