Most Egyptian rural fish retail markets remain underdeveloped with limited value addition or processing. Most fish production occurs in rural areas. However, informal rural fish retailers lack access to reliable supply of quality fish, with wholesalers and middle men transporting most fish to urban areas without any value addition or processing. This deprives rural communities of livelihood opportunities. Through this project, WorldFish aims at enabling rural fish producers and retailers penetrate new supply chains and markets in order to create better livelihoods for themselves by supplying more nutritious fish products to rural and urban markets. This will also enable poor and low-income consumers to get affordable nutritious food at reasonable prices through streamlining supply networks. The project will focus on making fish retailing more profitable by empowering rural women and youth through technical training, market engagement and business leadership.
The projective objectives are:
- To promote employment generation for women and youth, through establishment of rural based value addition and processing centres
- To improve profitability of rural-based fish processing and fish retail’ business by adoption of innovative novel products and quality assurance
The project will be implemented through the following work packages
- Establishment of women and youth-led training and processing centres
- Improved profitability of community-based fish processing and fish retail’ business development through adoption of innovations and quality assurance
- Market integration of women-led retail collectives into formal supply chains. Supporting women’s entrepreneurship development, each work package will be delivered through three specific modules designed from partner portfolios and ILO guidelines.
Employment generation for women and youth will be done through establishment of women and youth-led fish processing centres in rural areas. Rural supply will be boosted by influencing fish farmers and wholesalers to supply their fish to rural fish processing units, who will process the fish and supply wholesale and urban markets with processed fish.
Women and youth fish retailers and processors will receive training on fish handling, processing techniques, and value addition skills and product development to diversify products and enable commercial scale production.
Linkages between informal retailers and local authorities and formal markets and supermarket chains through online fish market networks such as www.bashaier.org will assist businesses to increase profitability.
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