The fish stock sampling was carried out on 15 reservoirs in Eastern Province, between December 1989 and May 1992. The catch monitoring survey was carried out on Rukuzye and Makungwa dams between March 1991 and March 1992. The socio-economic study was conducted around Makungwa, Chadewa and Kangombe dam between December 1989 and March 1990.
Occasionally reference is made to Lutembwe dam. Lutembwe dam is used to provide water for Chipata. People are not living directly around this dam and implementation of fisheries management or development would not have been allowed here. Only limited information was collected around this reservoir
For sampling of the fish stocks ALCOM used a method developed by the Institute of Freshwater Research, Drottingholm, Sweden. This method is called the Drottingholm method, and uses multi-mesh gillnets which are set overnight. The number of nets and the areas where they are set are determined by the size of the reservoir and its maximum depth. The method uses the catch per unit of effort as a measure of abundance. For a detailed description of the method see Fjalling and Furst (1991).
The fish catches at the Rukuzye and Makungwa dams were recorded during five days per month. Since it was anticipated there would be a difference in fishing effort between week days and weekend days, two weekend days and three week days were chosen per month. Catches were recorded by enumerators, for a period of 12 hours, starting at 12.00 hours or at 0.00 hours at a sampling date, in total the catches of 127 fishermen were recorded.
Ideas and activities are not relevant to all households and individuals in a community. To ensure that the problems of the whole community are considered in a project intervention, the community had to be divided into target groups1. Target groups have to be recognisable in the field and meaningful in terms of extension work. Therefore, from the fisheries management and/or development point of view a division into fishing gear employed was the most convenient. Non-fishers were also considered an important section of the community. The study determined whether this stratification of reservoir communities was useful and looked into possibilities for enhancing the participation of certain groups in the fishery. For this purpose, the major attributes of the different target groups (access to resources, standard of living, food security) and the various types of fishery (necessary means of production, yield) were described.
A one-moment sample survey was chosen to generate the necessary data. Two interview schedules were designed. One for interviews with fishers, and one for interviews with households whose members did not fish in the reservoirs. In total 26 net fishers, 69 trap fishers, 72 anglers, 42 persons using other gears and 97 non-fishers were interviewed. The interviews with fishers were aimed at building up as complete a picture as possible of the different fishing methods encountered in the survey areas as well as the situation of the fishers. It focused on four problems:
description of the actual fishing effort;
description of access to resources, like, access to fishing grounds, gear and skill to operate the gear;
financial evaluation of different fishing methods;
description of the standard of living of fishers.
The interviews with the non-fishing community members were carried out to study three problems:
distribution of fish within the community;
other uses of the dam;
description of standard of living of community members compared to fishers.
More detailed information about data collection methods, sampling and data analysis, can be found in Appendix 1.
