Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI) programme: Safeguarding our seafood value chain in Southern Africa

Through its easy-to-use colour-coded listing system, tools and training, WWF-SASSI provides easily accessible science-based sustainability advice to consumers, retailers, restaurants, small-scale fishers, governments, chefs, and NGO partners. WWF-SASSI has been in existence for over a decade and is one of the most well-recognised and successful conservation programmes in the country. Based on experiences, lessons learnt and data analyses over 10 years, it is the perfect time to amplify efforts to provide sustainable consumption information to a wider consumer, emerging middle class, and retailer audience, based on understanding past impacts, and to also explore the possibility of replicating beyond South Africa through sharing lessons, knowledge, tools and methodologies, and providing support to other countries. WWF-SASSI has also come of age in a highly dynamic socio-economic South Africa. These changes have altered various sectors within the seafood supply and value chains and this has fostered the impetus for amplification of the programme. a. Enhanced awareness, accessibility and credibility of sustainable seafood information for consumers and retailers. A review of lessons-learned to date of the programme, research into consumer behaviour (to improve understanding of how consumers digest, process and share information), updated existing tools, and new, innovative tools will be available to consumers and disseminated through partner networks. b. Increased capacity for restaurants, chefs, ambassadors, partners and volunteers, to promote sustainable diets in the context of a sustainable seafood value chain through training, dialogue and collaboration. Workshops, training material dissemination and training, chef recognition awards will be held nationally empowering partners, volunteers, and restaurateurs and chefs to amplify the sustainable seafood message. c. Enabled, mobilised and active networks of key partners, at the national level (restaurants, chefs, ambassadors and local authorities); and regional level through strengthened collaborations to build a sustainable seafood network to replicate and scale up WWF-SASSI. These capacitated networks will communicate WWF-SASSI messages to the consumers in a strategic manner through workshops, webinars and social platform for information sharing. Projects' outcome is is to shift seafood consumption patterns and production practices to be more sustainable, by enabling consumers to make better-informed choices, and by strengthening collaboration with key partners and stakeholders, both nationally and regionally.