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Fishing communities are often recognised as being amongst the poorest in developing countries, and interventions targeted at improving resource status seen as central in the fight against poverty. A series of field assessments focusing on vulnerability conducted in two communities in Mali and Nigeria revealed some counterintuitive results. Despite fishing being the primary livelihood, vulnerabilities relating directly to the state of the resource were ranked lower than those relating to basic human needs. Those results challenge the conventional view and suggest that non-sectoral interventions can have more effective impacts on the livelihood of those communities than interventions targeting the resources.

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The objective of this paper is to describe the livelihoods of the rural populations of the Lake Chad Basin area (Sub-Saharan Africa), and in particular to assess the role of inland fishing activity in these livelihoods. For this purpose, a combination of activity and wealth ranking exercises was carried out in 64 villages of the Basin, completed by a series of comparative analyses of the ethnic composition, accessibility to fishing grounds and fishing gear ownership across the different socioeconomic strata of the populations. The analysis shows that for the entire area, households, irrespective of their wealth levels, still rely to a very large extent on subsistence-based economy where the three major activities (fishing, farming, and herding) are closely integrated. With respect to fishing activity the survey demonstrates the central role of this activity (in terms of income, labor, and food supply) for all wealth groups. But the analysis also reveals that there is no one-to-one relationship between the contribution of fishing activity and the wealth (or poverty) level of the households. In particular the analysis suggests that well-known adages such as “the fishermen are the poorest of the poor” or “the fishery is the activity of last resort” do not reflect the complexity of the real situation.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract Although there exists a rich literature on fisheries traditional management systems in North and South America, Caribbean, Asia and Pacific islands, much less information is available on inland African fisheries. Presents the first regional-scale survey of traditional management systems operated within the Lake Chad Basin. The survey focused on the status and organization of the local (de facto) management systems and their interactions with the modern (de jure) regulations. The results show that fishing activities within the whole Basin are still largely under the control of the traditional local authorities. The few open-access fishing grounds are areas that traditional authorities have never controlled or water-bodies that they have had to "give up" in recent times due to the presence of armed groups. These areas are also areas where illegal taxation systems operated by non-legitimated governement agents have developed, essentially as a consequence of the remoteness and political instability of the whole Basin.