**2. Aquaculture production in Africa**

*Innovation in the Food Sector Through the Valorization of Food and Agro-Food By-Products*

119 billion [1]. Its average growth rate of 8.8 percent has outpaced capture fisheries (1.2%) and terrestrial farmed meat production (2.8%) [1]. Aquaculture accounts for around 50 percent of seafood supply globally [2]. This quantity is expected to increase substantially as population increases (**Figure 1**). Aquaculture has gained much importance globally due to a decline in wild stock from natural water bodies; thus, aquaculture plays a key role in augmenting dwindling catch capture fisheries. It is well known that among other challenges facing the aquaculture sector, availability and quality of feeds affect its growth particularly in sub-Saharan (see for example [4–10]). Despite this challenge, aquaculture has been considered as one of the economic activities that contribute to poverty reduction, food security, and nutrition in the sub-Saharan Africa [4, 11, 12] and Asian countries [1, 13–17].

In order to realize the contribution of aquaculture in the alleviation of poverty and improvement of food security, development agencies should broaden their focus beyond poor/subsistence producers to include small and medium enterprises adopting a value chain perspective [18]. Bangladesh, which is among developing countries, has proven that aquaculture intervention in resource poor and marginalized group marked an increase in income savings and frequency of fish consumption [19]. Although small-scale fish farmers play a big role in poverty reduction and food security, the intensification from extensive to semi-intensive is essential [20]. However, for the intensification to take place, there should be an increase in investment in technological innovation and transfer through (i) Nutrition, feeds and feeding management, and (ii) low-impact production systems. This paper discusses

*Freshwater Aquaculture trend for African countries from 1990 to 2018 (data analyzed by this study see [3]).*

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**Figure 1.**

Africa's fisheries output is dominated by capture fisheries, but the contribution of aquaculture to the total amount of fish produced in the region has grown at a steady pace over the past decade (**Figure 1**). In these countries, fish is produced from capture fisheries and aquaculture. However, fish catches from wild sources have been declining, due to multiple anthropogenic pressures including climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction, invasion of non-native species, illegal, and unregulated fishing, and poor governance [21]. For example, consumption in the Eastern Africa region was projected to increase from 4.80 kg in 2013 to 5.49 kg by 2022 [22]. This implies that in order to meet the gap between fish production and the increasing demand for food fish, aquaculture production must double by 2050 to satisfy the Africa's fast-growing human population [23]. An appropriate way of keeping this sector growing constantly is the development of new researches aimed at determining the benefits of using different and cheap resources of feeds and determining how these strategies influence economic and productive parameters.


**Table 1.**

*Freshwater aquaculture production (tones) in Africa by country in 2018. (data analyzed by this study see [3]).*

In the aquaculture sector, Africa produced about 1400 tonnes of fish from freshwater aquaculture in 2018, but most of this came from Egypt, which contributed more than 70 percent of the total production (**Figure 1**, Data obtained in [3]). Major aquaculture producers in 2018 with more than 10,000 tonnes include Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Production has increased three times for the past ten tears from 563,000 in 2008 to 1,440,000 in 2018 (**Figure 1**, [3]). In general, African aquaculture production is overwhelmingly dominated by finfishes (99.3%), with only a small fraction of production from marine shrimps and mollusks [23]. Among the freshwater cultured finfishes, tilapia farming is the main product, which is also the most popular fish from a consumer perspective. Aquaculture production in Africa is also increasing as presented in **Table 1**.
