Fifteen Countries Sign Mombasa Declaration to Share Fisheries Data and Combat IUU Fishing

Fifteen countries from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe adopted the Mombasa Declaration on 17 June 2026 during the 11th Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, committing to advance global fisheries transparency and strengthen collective efforts to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. The declaration, with the broadest support from African nations including Cameroon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, the Republic of the Congo, and Somalia, represents one of the most concrete multilateral commitments on IUU fishing governance to emerge from the Our Ocean process in recent years.

 

The Case for Data Sharing and Multilateral Action

 

The declaration is built on the recognition that IUU fishing perpetrators are becoming increasingly sophisticated at evading individual countries' laws and regulations by relocating their operations between jurisdictions when enforcement pressure intensifies. Cephas Asare, West Africa regional manager for the Environmental Justice Foundation, has articulated the core problem directly, noting that illegal fishing operators exploit gaps between national regulatory systems and that addressing the issue requires transparency and cross-border tracking that no single country can provide alone. Signatory countries have committed to harmonising regulations and sharing information on vessels operating in their territorial waters, creating a cooperative intelligence framework that raises the cost of evasion by reducing the number of jurisdictions where operators can disappear from monitoring. IUU fishing costs West African countries millions of dollars annually, threatens fish stocks, and undermines the food security of millions of people for whom fish is the primary source of animal protein.

 

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Key Commitments Under the Declaration

 

Among the specific measures included in the Mombasa Declaration, signatory countries have committed to adopting the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency, which calls for the publication of fishing licences, authorisations, access agreements, and fishing quota allocations. The charter also encourages countries to ensure that all industrial fishing vessels carry unique vessel identifiers and to progressively extend UVI requirements to small-scale vessels, creating a traceable identification system that links vessel activity to operator identity across jurisdictions. The combination of transparent licensing data and vessel identification creates the informational foundation on which effective cross-border IUU enforcement depends, since tracking the movement of fishing vessels between national waters requires both the ability to identify individual vessels and the willingness of multiple states to share what they observe. Signatory countries called on other coastal states to adopt the declaration at a press conference in Mombasa, signalling an intention to expand the coalition beyond the initial fifteen.

 

Food Security and National Security Dimensions

 

Ghana's Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Emelia Arthur, has articulated the stakes of the declaration in the starkest possible terms, describing fish as central to national existence in Ghana, where 60 percent of animal protein comes from fish and 10 percent of the population depends on the fisheries value chain for their livelihoods. Arthur has framed fisheries as a matter of culture and national security rather than a purely economic or environmental issue, a characterisation that elevates IUU fishing from a regulatory compliance question to a sovereign security concern. That framing is significant for the political durability of the declaration, because it grounds the commitment to transparency and data sharing in the direct material interests of governments and populations rather than in abstract governance principles. For West African countries in particular, where artisanal and small-scale fisheries are foundational to coastal community food security and economic survival, the enforcement of fishing rights against illegal industrial fleets is inseparable from the welfare of the most vulnerable populations.