Rural aquaculture: Assessment of its contribution to household income and farmers’ perception in selected districts, Tanzania

Abstract

Rural fish farming is being promoted as a good source of protein and income diversification to fight poverty and inequality. However, its actual contribution to these rural households and local community at large is little known. Through interviews with 89 farmers’ and 6 key informants, we examined the contribution of rural fish farming to local farmers’ household income and investigate farmers’ perceptions, opportunities, and constraints towards fish farming in six districts of Tanzania. Results indicated that fish farming contributed on average 13% to household incomes and that it explained 5% of the variation of the household income while 84% of the variation was due to non-fish sources. The majority (79%) of the farmers wanted to continue with fish farming, 9% planned to quit, and 12% had not decided whether to continue or not. Conclusively, much higher aquaculture contribution towards rural development could be obtained if appropriate measures are taken.

Keywords:

• Fish income
• household income contribution
• income diversification
• perception
• rural fish farming
• Tanzania

Note

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to fish farmers for taking their time to respond to the questionnaires and district fisheries officers who helped in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The price of produce varied across the districts and time with statistically insignificant differences. Moreover, as the study explored the overall income contribution from aquaculture, price variation was not considered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) through the Bilateral Sida-UDSM Marine Sciences program under Grant [SWE-2010-194]. Additional funding was provided by the Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University.