Valuing Africa's inland fisheries: overview of current methodologies with an emphasis on livelihood analysis

Abstract

While Africa’s inland fisheries are widely recognized to be of great importance to local people, accurate and up-to-date information on their value is sparse and its absence is a serious constraint to the formulation of effective fisheries policies and management practices. As a contribution to current efforts to address this constraint, this paper reviews the different methods that are potentially applicable to the valuation of inland fisheries and discusses their respective rationales and limitations within a multi-sectoral, multi-user context. The livelihood analysis approach is given special emphasis. The complementarity of this recently developed approach with the other, more conventional, environmental economics methods is illustrated.