Kigoma, Tanzania – Just as dawn’s first rays start creeping over western Tanzania’s gentle hills, a constellation of scattered torchlights moving across the water signals the arrival of the fishermen returning to shore.
The early morning hours, when fishers ferry their bounty to the beach and women stake their spot in the market to sell the day’s catch, are when the clusters of towns and villages along Lake Tanganyika’s eastern shore come to life.
Shaped like a thin, outstretched finger tracing the borders of Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi and Zambia, Lake Tanganyika is a place of superlatives: more than 400 miles (644km) in length, it’s the world’s longest freshwater lake, and with a low point nearly 5,000 feet (1,524 metres) below the surface, it’s one of the deepest.
One brisk morning in Kaseke, a fishing village in northwestern Tanzania, Dunia Omari Kiswabe, 54, hauls in his catch. Wearing an oversized football jersey and waterproof cargo pants, he splashes through the surf with bucketfuls of dagaa, a type of sardine fishers attract with torches during moonless nights.
On this day, Kiswabe, who has been fishing on the lake for at least two decades, unloads only 10 buckets of dagaa. It’s a disappointing amount and a haul size that is becoming all too common for Lake Tanganyika’s fishers.
“I used to get maybe 50 buckets a day,” he said. “Fishing has always been difficult for us, but it’s been getting harder.”
Teenage boys run by him carrying catches from other boats to the drying racks in the village, their work with Kiswabe already done.
“It must be God’s plan.”
Lake Tanganyika is Africa’s longest reservoir of fresh water and a lifeblood for the millions who live near it. But in recent years, fish catches have declined sharply.
Some research suggests the lake’s habitable zones for fish have shrunk as much as 38 percent since the 1940s. A new survey is scheduled to begin later this year to understand the scale of the collapse, but changes in the lake are starting to manifest as catches flatline. Between 2020 and 2024, fish production dropped nearly 20 percent, fisheries officials told local media last year.
Lake Tanganyika accounts for 40 percent of Tanzania’s fish catches, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). However, as the possibly insurmountable challenges facing fisheries become clear, locals are grappling with the realisation that the lake might never be as productive as it once was.
The Tanzanian government took matters into its own hands in May 2024, closing its side to all fishing for three months to help fish repopulate. But on the list of problems Lake Tanganyika faces, overfishing could be the lowest-hanging fruit, paling in comparison with the lake’s most existential challenges, which range from climate change to mounting resource scarcity amid rising population pressures on the lake’s shores. As productivity slows and economic conditions harden, policy fixes might struggle to keep pace with the changes happening within the lake, experts say.
Most fishers along the lake’s Tanzanian shore continue to prepare their boats, pack their nets, and set out every night for smaller and smaller hauls. For so long, the lake was all there was and all anyone needed.
That is increasingly no longer true.
Standstill in the fisheries industry
In Lubengera, a town of rickety homes and walkways built along a hillside descending to the lake, locals alternate speaking Swahili and local tribal tongues with an unexpected third language: French.
In recent decades, more than 200,000 refugees from Burundi and the DRC, two former Belgian colonies, have flowed into Tanzania. Most asylum seekers from these countries remain in towns like Lubengera and nearby camps, close to the lake whose waters their homeland shares.
Population pressures due to migration along Lake Tanganyika are exacerbated by demographic trends across the country. Rapid urbanisation and high birth rates are set to double the country’s population every 23 years, according to a 2024 World Bank report. As the population rises, so will the need for food. Population and economic growth will more than double the demand for fish in Tanzania by 2030, according to a 2021 report from WorldFish, a research organisation focusing on aquatic food systems.
“The land and lake is not increasing. It’s only people who are increasing,” said Lukindo Hiza, director of the Tuungane Project, a development initiative in Lake Tanganyika managed by the Nature Conservancy, an international nonprofit.
The government implemented the fishing ban last year to ease fishing pressures in the lake. During the closure, patrols regularly monitored popular fishing sites for signs of illegal fishing. In September, after the lake had reopened, reports in government-owned media celebrated the ban’s success, claiming fish stocks had rebounded.
But the last time officials conducted a lakewide assessment of fish stocks was in 1996, assisted by the FAO. Another survey is due to begin this year, according to Hashim Muumin, an FAO fisheries officer based in Kigoma, the only large city on the lake’s Tanzanian side.
Without robust data prior to the closure, it is difficult to know with certainty whether the fishing ban had a lasting impact on fisheries productivity, said Tumaini Kamulali, a researcher at the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute, a government body.
“If you don’t have data about what you have before you close, then you can’t tell us about what you have after you open,” he said.
Lack of data is not the only problem.
Warmer water temperatures and slower wind speeds, both tied to regional effects of climate change, are chipping away at Lake Tanganyika’s natural internal circulation, which mixes nutrients from its depths with surface water, fuelling algae growth and feeding fish.
One 2016 study, published in the academic journal PNAS, tracked warming patterns in Lake Tanganyika over the past 150 years and their effect on fish abundance, concluding that fish populations began declining “well before the explosive growth of commercial fisheries on the lake in the mid-20th century”.
Periodic fishing bans might reduce pressures from overfishing, but if climate change’s effect on fish populations is indeed as pernicious as scientists suspect, lake closures might not be enough, Kamulali said.
Aquaculture’s ‘generational opportunity’
To supplant fishing incomes during the closure, the government offered loans for fishers to set up their own fish farms as well as five days of training on how to operate them.
Interest in fish farming, also known as aquaculture, soared during the closure as locals sought ways to keep producing fish, said Alexander Chetkovich, who since 2022 has managed Tanganyika Blue, the lake’s first commercial fish farm.
Tanganyika Blue raises native tilapia in nine offshore cages near Kigoma with plans to expand in the next year. Chetkovich said there’s a “generational opportunity” in this new trend, one where fishing pressures on the lake will naturally reduce and communities can sustain themselves through aquaculture, rather than depending on unpredictable fishing.
In Kipili, a town nestled between a chain of small islands on the lake’s southwestern shore, the nonprofit organisation, Sustain, and a local lodge, are piloting their own aquaculture experiment. In 2020, they established a pond farm, raising fish in artificial inland basins. They are prioritising a hatcheries business, breeding about 60,000 juvenile fish called fingerlings a month and selling them to people starting fish farms.
But having fishers transition to independent fish farmers might be an uphill battle.
Awareness of the government loan programme is scant in remote villages, and few fishers can offer enough collateral to qualify for a loan. Success is also not guaranteed for those who do receive one. Several fishers were wary of the enterprise given the training offered was only five days, a problem in a field like aquaculture that can have a high failure rate for first-time operators.
The Kipili fish farm, which is contracted to supply fingerlings for the loan programme, has even had to slow its shipments in recent months after the government encountered delays in issuing cages to loan recipients.
With fishing bans likely to become a regular fixture and the government’s grand aquaculture project yet to take off, some locals are looking elsewhere to make their living.
Carving their own path forward
To reach the minuscule lakeside village of Rukoma, all-terrain vehicles are necessary to navigate uneven dirt paths, which become all but unreachable during Tanzania’s rainy seasons. Its remoteness has long meant that limited employment options exist beyond fishing and farming.
Life in Rukoma is changing quickly, however. In the past year, Juma Hussein, a driver, bought a new motorcycle to taxi residents to different towns in the area. Rahma Juma, a tailor, secured funding to import textiles from DRC and widen the catalogue of styles and colours she offers clients. Methusela Meshak, a fisherman, took out a loan to build ponds in his backyard for farmed tilapia.
Entrepreneurship is thriving in Rukoma thanks to the village’s community conservation bank, established by the Nature Conservancy in 2016. Each of the initiative’s 44 members contributes to and can take out loans from a common fund, which currently holds about 100 million Tanzanian shillings (almost $40,000).
Community funds can be a critical lifeline for Lake Tanganyika’s secluded villages. Only 58 percent of residents in Tanzania’s Kigoma region, which includes the city of Kigoma as well as smaller towns such as Rukoma, have regular access to financial services, according to a 2023 government survey. Kigoma ranked second-lowest among the country’s 31 regions for financial inclusion and was one of only five to register a decline compared with 2017.
Community-driven initiatives can help rural communities diversify incomes and explore business ideas, said Clement Mabula, a Nature Conservancy officer based in Buhingu, a village near Rukoma.
“It’s hard to get by now if you’re only catching fish,” he said.
Part of Mabula’s job is also to make fishing more efficient by helping Beach Management Units, another initiative by the Nature Conservancy that empowers communities to manage local fisheries and impart more effective techniques, such as policing the use of small mosquito nets that entrap fingerlings, or using buoys to mark key breeding sites close to shore.
But even the best community-managed solutions have their limits. For large, shared resources like Lake Tanganyika, community management’s record has been “mixed at best,” according to Christopher Anderson, a fisheries economist at the University of Washington, who researches the economic effects of different fisheries management structures, including community rights systems.
When managing these resources, priorities and definitions of success can get muddled, Anderson said. It can also be difficult to institute a completely decentralised system, and government intervention, even when necessary, can paralyse community efforts. Confusion over a recent zoning dispute in the Kipili archipelago, which is overseen by 11 separate management units, forced members in the village of Kipili to pause patrols for four months last year.
Places like Kipili, Rukoma and Kigoma face a mosaic of challenges as population growth strains job availability and resources. Aquaculture’s steep learning curve and high upfront costs present significant difficulties for smallholders looking to start their own fish farms. Conservation-oriented fishing practices do little to address the lake’s other challenges like climate change.
To ensure the future of Lake Tanganyika, the communities who live here might have to continue looking past what the lake alone has to offer.
Voices of the future
Fishing is generational in Kipili, the profession traditionally passing from father to son. But in this village and others like it, fishing is becoming less of a birthright and more of a burden.
Across the bay from Kipili’s hectic fish markets and landing sites, a complex of white single-storey buildings rises from the landscape of rice farms and cassava plantations. It is the local high school, where Paul Kaluse, a teacher, kicks off his geography lesson.
The focus of today’s class is conservation, specifically how to protect Lake Tanganyika’s fisheries. Of the 40 students in attendance, many have fathers who fish, Kaluse said.
But not all are eager to see their children follow in their footsteps. Gaudens Kasokota, the chairman for fisheries activities in Kipili, said he would rather his children not tie themselves to fishing as he did, preferring to see them farm or run other businesses, like producing fingerlings. If they must fish, he added, they should do it to feed themselves and their families, not to earn a living.
Kaluse’s students were well aware of the nature and challenges of fishing in Lake Tanganyika, exhibiting extensive knowledge on everything from the size of regulation fishing nets to the importance of leaving fingerlings alone to grow. The answer to the lake’s problems is simple, in their telling.
“We don’t need to close the lake again, as long as people just use the right gear,” one boy exclaimed.
“The problem isn’t closing the lake, it’s making sure fishermen are educated on the right places to fish and the right equipment,” a deskmate contributed.
“Close it for the really small nets that catch a lot of fish, so everyone fishes for themselves,” another said.
As the voices of Lake Tanganyika’s future made clear, even a generational attachment to what fishing once was might not be enough to stop what’s coming.
“As long as people have resources they can change,” Kasokota said. “Our history isn’t going to be what holds us back.”
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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