Fishing Communities Fight
for Survival in Uganda
On the shores of Lake Victoria, women-led resistance
challenges military violence, privatization, and hunger
Fatuma is a fisherwoman who lives in a village on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda, the largest lake in Africa and the world’s second-largest freshwater body. When she started fishing thirty years ago, it was a “very lucrative” livelihood, she says.
Fish were so abundant that fishers could walk a few metres into the water and catch a bounty. One of the main targets for local fisherfolk is silverfish, a small species that, once dried in the sun, becomes a nutrient-dense, shelf-stable staple.
For a micro-scale operation like Fatuma’s, the lake provided a comfortable living—she’d generate cash income by selling into local markets, with enough silverfish left over to feed her household year-round.
“We’d even give some to our neighbours—not selling, but just giving,” she says. “It was a tradition.”
In the years since 2017, the traditional fishing villages clustered around Lake Victoria have experienced multiple shocks. Under perpetual pressure to generate foreign exchange after decades of structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund on behalf of Global North creditors, the Ugandan government has allied with private business interests seeking to seize and exploit Lake Victoria’s bounty for exports.
In defence of their livelihoods, villagers have suffered extreme violence, the burning of their homes, and terror at the hands of the Ugandan military.
Villagers are currently banned from catching silverfish. And yet, Fatuma and her peers remain in place.
Their perseverance and survival strategies in the face of state-sanctioned oppression provide a beacon for communities worldwide fighting for their right to exist against similar pushes to privatize common resources.
Even in better times, during Fatuma’s youth, life on the shore wasn’t idyllic. Petty theft of fishing gear was a problem; and oppressive gender norms prevented women like Fatuma from actually fishing, relegating them to tasks like drying the silverfish, vending it, and managing the business.
For years, Fatuma had to hide the fact that she was running a fishing business from her husband, who would have otherwise forbidden it. But overall, the lake provided shoreline fishing communities with a robust income source and an abundant food supply, which they’d supplement with small-scale vegetable gardening.
Fishing boats on the banks of Lake Victoria. Photo: Jjumba Martin.
Fishing boats on the banks of Lake Victoria. Photo: Jjumba Martin.
Fishermen cast their net seeking silverfish.
Fishermen cast their net seeking silverfish.
Aquaculture operations replacing small-scale fisher's access to resources. Photo: Jjumba Martin.
Aquaculture operations replacing small-scale fisher's access to resources. Photo: Jjumba Martin.
Things began to sour in the mid-2010s. Villagers’ already-tenuous access to land for vegetable gardening was further restricted from the encroachment of flower plantations—meaning that an ornamental export crop was squeezing out local food production for residents.
These often foreign-owned flower operations not only drive up the cost of housing but also pollute the near-shore regions of the lake with runoff, which feeds fetid green algae blooms. Worse, flags marking new and unexplained boundaries for local fisherfolk began appearing in the lake.
In a grim echo of Uganda’s past as a British colony, a well-connected white fishing magnate known locally as Cooper turned out to be behind the flags. Government officials told the communities that Cooper’s role was to prevent overfishing in an area of the lake known to be a breeding ground for wild fish.
In practice, however, Fatuma says Cooper asserted financial control of a large swath of the lake, demanding the exclusive right to buy any fish caught there at cut-rate prices. Ultimately, Cooper left, only to be replaced by a white woman named Alison, who continues to enforce the same arrangement to this day.
Meanwhile, outside investors began installing cages to farm higher-value species such as tilapia and Nile perch—warning community fisherpeople to stay away. With their range within the lake drastically curtailed, catching enough fish to make a living became impossible, she says. Tensions rose. Some local fisherfolk began defying the new restrictions and sabotaging the farm cages, eventually driving the aquaculture investors out of the lake.
As a result, villagers’ access to food plummeted and poverty rose.
“It’s so bad that we can hardly get enough fish to eat at home,” Fatuma says. “Everyone has become very poor, because when the army arrests someone in your household, you have to sell what you have to be able to get them out of the army barracks—if you have a goat, you have to sell it, or a chicken, or anything that you have.”
A few years before the army began terrorizing the village, Rehema was working for a non-governmental organization on projects to empower women living on the shores of Lake Victoria.
Rehema is the daughter of a landless farm worker family in Uganda’s central region, and the poverty and indignities she experienced as a child instilled in her a “strong desire for justice,” she says. “If people are suffering, and I can’t do anything about it, the weight of that helplessness becomes unbearable.” Her work at that time involved providing direct services to the women, such as providing boats, cows and other resources to improve their livelihoods.
For Rehema, this approach was piecemeal and did not address the root causes of injustice, and its benefits were often eroded by the rampant human rights violations.
Rehema longed to address the fact that communities that had lived along the shore for generations had a right to land tenure and access to the lake—yet they were being “chased off.”
In 2020, NTV Uganda investigated the human rights abuses facing fishers on Lake Victoria, exposing the violence and loss that continue to shape the daily reality of communities like Fatuma’s.
She first met Fatuma during this period. Rehema began hearing disturbing stories from villagers about a wave of oppression in fishing communities. She encountered several cases of women who had borrowed money to buy fishing boats and start small enterprises, only to be effectively barred from fishing under the new rules, leaving them stranded with debt, no income, and no alternative livelihood opportunities from either the land or the lake. In another case, her group helped a woman install a toilet in her home—just before she was evicted without cause, forcing her to “leave behind everything she had worked for.”
In 2018, Rehema co-founded the Ugandan national branch of FIAN International, a global human rights advocacy group with presence in nineteen countries, whose mission is to “support grassroots communities and movements in their struggles against right to food violations.
By the time she was up and running as FIAN Uganda’s Country Coordinator, the army’s assault on Lake Victoria’s villagers was in full effect.
Fatuma, who had been a beneficiary of Rehema’s at her previous NGO, had in the intervening years emerged as a leader in the community, winning election as a local county leader.
Rehema and the villagers devised a two-part strategy for defending the communities against military violence.
First, on Fatuma’s request, FIAN Uganda used its connections in the local media to invite a TV news station into the community to hear firsthand their troubles with the army.
At the time, Rehema says, villagers were “being shot down, pushed in water, and killed—and there was total silence” in the Ugandan media. Meanwhile, Rehema had mobilized ten people willing to speak on camera about their experiences.
Rehema and her FIAN colleagues knew that people who appeared on the news segment were in danger of reprisal, and explained the risk to the villagers. The fisherfolk were so fed up with their treatment that they insisted on doing it anyway. As feared, all ten were beaten by army forces the day after the broadcast. However, bringing attention to the atrocities they were experiencing achieved a respite.
Although her colleagues had to “suffer the [soldiers’] canes,” Fatuma says the report sparked public outrage, and the army withdrew for a time.
Evidence of the army's brutal terror campaign were widely reported in the local and national media
Evidence of the army's brutal terror campaign were widely reported in the local and national media
Rehema and her colleagues at FIAN Uganda caught wind of a fisheries bill under debate in the national parliament.
Working with public-interest lawyers, the group demanded access to the draft, which the government had concealed in an apparent attempt to ease its passage without community input. They discovered that the proposed bill would officially legitimize the army’s control of aquatic sites, including Lake Victoria and other major lakes, to control fisheries—that is, the army would get to decide who could fish and when, and enforce their decisions with violence.
The communities’ previous experience made it clear that asserting their own right to make a living from the lake would put them in physical jeopardy, while connected players like Cooper and Allison would enjoy free access.
In 2022, FIAN Uganda, working with empowered women leaders in the community like Fatuma, again mobilized fisherpeople, this time to testify before a group of parliament members, including those from the fisheries committee and representatives from the Lake Victoria shoreline.
Most of the people testifying were women, and “some women had been sexually assaulted, and they said this right in front of the members of parliament,” Rehema says. They also showed the TV segment of community testimonies recorded earlier.
Ultimately, after much back-and-forth and negotiation, the amendment granting the army authority to regulate fisheries was dropped from the legislation.
Rehema calls the effort a “huge success,” adding that, “I've learned that there’s power in working with people and just providing a platform for them to tell their stories.”
In addition to the media and parliamentary testimonies, community members are engaging in “advocacy through theatre,” playing out their stories in songs and plays as a tool to give voice to their peers and educate them about their rights.
Despite this success, massive problems remain.
The army has pulled back from committing regular atrocities, but it has set up several camps at the edge of fishing villages, conducting arbitrary arrests and detentions. Alison still controls a large part of the lake.
More chilling still, in February 2024, the government imposed a ban on catching silverfish, effectively sidelining Fatuma and her peers while leaving Alison free to pursue her prize catch, Nile perch, whose maw (swimming bladder) is a high-value delicacy in China.
FIAN is actively fighting the ban in parliament and the courts. They’re also pushing against strong opposition to pass a Right to Food and Nutrition law, which would grant longstanding communities like Fatuma’s land tenure and access to resources like silverfish, while building awareness and empowering local lawyers to better defend local communities’ right to food in future.
In the meantime, Fatuma says the only hope is for the communities to continue telling their story to parliament and the world. “When you’re stealing or doing something bad, and no one sees you or no one speaks up, you will continue,” she says. But “if someone taps you and asks, What are you doing—then you will get scared, and maybe stop or pause a bit.”
Key Takeaways
The Ugandan government cited claims of Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing to justify their sending in the military to monitor and terrorize local communities. The government sacrificed the well-being of lakeside communities to pave the way for export-focused aquaculture, following the precedent set on land, where exporting flower farms gained priority access to the most productive agricultural land bordering the lake. If it weren’t for FIAN’s mobilization of legal support and media, basic rights to fishing and farming would be lost.
Aquaculture in this instance threatens to pair with flower farm runoff to drive eutrophication of the lake while introducing predatory invasive species and reducing communities’ options to locally meet their own nutrition and livelihood needs, let alone maintain their cultural heritage. Traditional fishing and farming practices are being sidelined in the pursuit of greater and more consolidated profits for more affluent individuals who are better able to make deals with officials, can be more conveniently taxed, and can generate foreign exchange through exports. In this way, privatization of the lakeshore has already limited community access to aquatic and terrestrial resources, and privatizing areas of the lake for aquaculture companies is directly limiting communities’ access to traditional fishing areas.
Low-wage jobs in export-oriented industries do not guarantee community well-being, nor does their presence serve as an excuse for abuses. Terrestrial farms and aquaculture facilities tend to promote their employment opportunities as a panacea. But ultimately, low-wage employment reduces fishers — who are rights-holders, food providers, and stewards of marine biodiversity — to cheap labour. This not only undermines their human rights but also threatens to transform local food systems, affecting access to affordable fish and narrowing local choices within communities. It strips fishers and their communities of the power to decide what they consume, how it is produced, and by whom — principles at the heart of food sovereignty.
Traditional gender norms have been strategically weaponized to divide and conquer communities, with witch-hunting — possibly driven by external forces — used to demonize women who engage in the actual fishing sector rather than just doing shoreside processing of catch. Despite this, women are showing exceptional bravery and are being proactively empowered through the highlighted collaboration.
Shared threats of abuse and exploitation have been the glue binding communities together across the fishing–farming nexus — against the odds in this case. These communities are strategically addressing the diverse and dynamic injustices they face, but the battle is far from won, and attacks on their traditional way of life continue to multiply. Communities are doing their best to stay afloat and respond to evolving challenges—but with effective donor support that prioritizes long-term impact and provides flexible funding, they can proactively adapt their approaches, build resilience, and drive sustainable change as local realities shift.
Acknowledgements
Storytelling
Fisherfolk on Lake Victoria, Uganda
Roy Bealey, Lead Researcher, Pelagic Fisheries Consulting Ltd. (PFC), Kenya
Tom Philpott, Journalist, John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, USA
Yifang Slot Tang, FIAN International, Germany
Emily Mattheisen, McKnight Foundation, USA
Jjumba Martin, Photographer, Uganda
Meena Nallainathan, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, Canada
Beacons of Hope Advisory Committee
Pak Salman, Fisher, Indonesia
Ahmed Imere, Fisher, Kenya
Gaoussou Gueye, CAOPA, Senegal
Nadine Nembhard, World Forum of Fisher Peoples, Belize
Beatrice Gorez, Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, Belgium
Nireka Weeratunge, International Center for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka
Niaz Dorry, North American Marine Alliance, USA
Javiera Calisto, Oak Foundation, Chile/Switzerland
Josh To, A Growing Culture, Canada
We would like to give special thanks to Imani Fairweather-Morrison (Oak Foundation) and Beatrice Gorez (Coalition for Fair Fishers Arrangements) for the inspiration to keep fishers at the centre of this work and for their wise steering and steadfast support. And special thanks to Leslie Hatfield (GRACE Communications Foundation) for bringing us closer to fisher movements and their stories.
Global Alliance Aquatic-Terrestrial Foods Nexus Working Group
Oak Foundation
GRACE Communications Foundation
Walton Family Foundation
Erol Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
We also want to thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting the evolution of Beacons of Hope.
Global Alliance Secretariat
We appreciate the support of Dharini Parthasarathy, Melanie Moran, Lauren Baker, Anna Lappé from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food for strengthening the production of the stories. We extend our thanks to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food secretariat for making this publication possible. We extend our thanks to Tracy Bordian for copy-editing, Cultivate Communications for creative direction and design, TINTA The Invisible Thread for interpretation, and Owlingua and Myriam Helou for translation. And appreciation to Katy Taylor for mentorship and anti-oppression coaching. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is responsible for the content of this report and any errors or omissions.
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