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Good practice Imported

ABALOBI — Co-Designing an Offline-First Digital Toolkit With South Africa's Small-Scale Fishers

South Africa · Cape Town · See the South Africa profile · See the Cape Town profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 10% 96/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2015, University of Cape Town researchers and small-scale fishers have co-designed the ABALOBI app suite — large icon-based controls usable with cold, wet hands and low literacy — reaching 271 active fisher users and thousands more along the value chain.

271
Active fisher app users
5,700+
Fishers reached directly (programme-wide)
18,000+
Fishers/buyers reached indirectly
ABALOBI — Co-Designing an Offline-First Digital Toolkit With South Africa's Small-Scale Fishers

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
ABALOBI
Period
2015–present
Keywords
fisheries, digital inclusion, co-design

Context

ABALOBI began in 2015 as a participatory-action-research project at the University of Cape Town, co-founded by Dr Serge Raemaekers, to give South Africa's small-scale fishers a digital tool for logging catches, expenses and sea conditions.

Activities

The design process treated fishers as co-designers: large tap targets and icon-based navigation usable with cold, wet or numb hands, works offline, and was iteratively refined with fishing communities rather than built and handed over.

Results

The ABALOBI Fisher app is used by 271 small-scale fishers, with the wider programme reporting over 5,700 fishers reached directly and more than 18,000 fishers and seafood buyers reached indirectly.

Conclusions

The gap between 271 active core-app users and much larger 'reached' value-chain figures is worth noting honestly: deep co-designed adoption still covers a modest number of primary users.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — University-led participatory-action-research project since 2015; specific development/running costs not published.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Began 2015; 2025 Ocean Exchange finalist; extending to Seychelles.
Staffing & skills
University of Cape Town participatory-design researchers, small-scale fisher co-designers

Conditions for success

  • iterative co-design with fishing communities as design partners, not end users
  • offline-first design for low-connectivity coastal areas
  • large icon-based controls usable with cold/wet hands and low literacy

Common failure modes

  • gap between 271 active core-app users and much larger 'reached' value-chain figures — deep co-designed adoption still modest in absolute numbers

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Data sources

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