The Bay of Bengal Programme Inter-Governmental Organisation (BOBP-IGO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have signed a Letter of Agreement to host a regional capacity-building workshop in September 2025 to support the development of National Plans of Action for Small-Scale Fisheries (NPOAs-SSF) in Bangladesh, India, Maldives, and Sri Lanka.
Part of FAO’s ongoing efforts to promote the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines), the workshop will bring together government officials, small-scale fisheries representatives, academia, and civil society. The goal is to build technical capacity and strengthen participatory policy processes.
The training will follow FAO’s structured NPOA-SSF development process and focus on the SSF Guidelines’ five key thematic areas – governance of tenure and resource management, social development, employment and decent work, value chains, post-harvest and trade, gender equality, and disaster risks and climate change.
‘FAO is working closely with countries and partners to provide technical guidance, capacity building, and knowledge sharing to support NPOA-SSF development,’ said Director of FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division Manuel Barange.
The workshop will include presentations and discussions on legal and policy diagnostics currently under review by BOBP-IGO, training on participatory planning approaches, and small-scale fisheries profiling using data and methodologies from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests (IHH) study, tailored to the Bay of Bengal context. The workshop also aims to increase national-level action through the co-development of high-level roadmaps for NPOA-SSF development.
The initiative builds on the momentum generated by the High-Level Meeting on Mainstreaming the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries in Small-Scale Fisheries, held in the Maldives in February 2025, which endorsed the need for national plans of actions for small-scale fisheries and regional cooperation under the BOBLME project. This was also one of the next steps agreed at the Regional small-scale fisheries (SSF) workshop in Asia, held at Bangkok in March 2025.
