The WLE 2018 Annual Report > Highlights from 2018

Partnerships for fish
This year, we developed 86 new partnerships. At the global level, the memorandum of understanding with the FAO, which was signed at the 33rd Session of the Committee on Fisheries (COFI) from 9–13 July in Rome, Italy, is strengthening our capacity to influence global policy on a range of sustainable development issues.
We are also pursuing closer links with the private sector. An agreement with the global aquafeed manufacturer Skretting is laying the foundations for a long-term research program that can link favorable traits in tilapia to Skretting feed formulations. This has exciting potential to increase the profitability of small-scale fish farmers, particularly in Africa.
At the national level, we signed an agreement with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to produce a comprehensive five-year integrated research program for funding consideration by ICAR. India is one of our scaling countries. The ongoing projects in Odisha, an eastern state on the Bay of Bengal, are designed around scaling of key WorldFish technologies, including carp-mola polyculture and the inclusion of nutrient-rich fish in the diets of women and children, which have been tested and validated in focal countries such as Bangladesh
We collaborate with several CGIAR centers, research programs and platforms. A highlight of the collaboration with the Platform for Big Data in Agriculture was our participation in the 2018 Inspire Challenge, where one of our teams working in Timor-Leste won one of the five awards. The USD 100,000 grant that came with the award will support research on establishing an integrated data pipeline for small-scale fisheries. The pipeline will use novel, linked information and communications technologies to develop an open source, scalable system to map small-scale fisheries production over time and space.
Every day, about 40 million small-scale fishers go out fishing, yet virtually none of these activities or yields are documented. This long-standing global data deficiency underpins SDG 14—Life below water—but can now be solved by small, mobile and affordable information and communications technologies.Dr. Alex TilleyWorldFish scientist and 2018 Inspire Challenge winner