Lake Victoria, located in the East African Plateau between Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, is the site of one of the largest freshwater fisheries in the world. In Uganda, fisheries represent a vast source of income for the rural communities living on its shores and beyond.
Kachanga is a community of about 500 people on the shores of Lake Victoria in the Central Region of Uganda. The small town is built around the beach and consists mainly of dispersed small huts made of aluminium that lack water and sanitation services. The mornings in Kachanga go by slowly and around the late morning, the community finds itself on the shores, waiting for the fishermen to come from the lake’s waters with fresh catches. 
The entire local economy relies on the lake’s aquatic resources, on the fisheries sustained by Lake Victoria. In Kachanga, time schedules, relationships, livelihoods, and even the existence or non-existence of conflict revolves around the lake’s fisheries.

In recent years, catches have been waning and scarcity caused by overfishing, illegal fishing and poor management is threatening the fishing communities around the lake. Management of fisheries resources is an area of increasing disputes, as community members are often pitted against local government officials over taxes and licensing fees that they need to pay. A fundamental lack of trust within the community, between the community and local leaders and between different levels of government in the local sphere (i.e. district, subcounty and village level) has ensued in communities around Lake Victoria on different areas of fisheries management.

Another factor driving internal tensions and distrust in the industry is the lack of financial and livelihood alternatives that many fishermen and fishmongers face. “Many times other fishermen steal my net,” says one of the fishermen, as he returns from hours of work in the waters of the lake. “Many of us have seen catches decrease and we cannot buy new gear if ours are stolen. If someone else sees himself in that situation, he will most likely just steal someone else’s net. This repeats itself over and over and creates conflict among us.” 

In this context, the Strengthening Aquatic Resource Governance project financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development seeks to implement institutional innovations in each of the selected communities in Lake Victoria in Uganda, Lake Kariba in Zambia, and the Tonle Sap/Lower Mekong region of Cambodia in order to reduce the existence of broader social conflict while supporting gains in human security.
In Kachanga, community leaders, district and subcounty officials and community members participated in an exercise to prioritise their development needs and to select one tangible project around which the community could rally. An innovative sanitation project consisting of a set of biogas toilets was selected by the community and the process of stakeholder engagement, ownership building and construction began.

The first results of the multi-stakeholder engagement process are starting to emerge. Community stakeholders are able to improve their ability to engage constructively with other stakeholders—often more powerful ones. Community members and officials of different levels of local government are starting to exchange more often about crucial issues affecting the communities; industry and community members, fisheries officials and local leaders meet regularly, working together towards a common purpose.