West African Fish Farmers Manage Their Ponds with an IoT-Enabled Smart Probe

Aquaculture is a major source of income for many people in Africa. It is the fastest-growing food sector, providing affordable protein for most of the population. The aquaculture industry in Africa has grown consistently over the past decade, with an average annual growth rate of 8 to 10%, according to the FAO. However, as with farming in general, certain challenges persist in the aquaculture industry.

Ghanaian startup Aquamet was developed to solve a long-standing challenge in West African fish farming: the loss of fish caused by poor water management.

Aquaculture in Africa, especially West Africa, has not kept up with technological improvements in the broader industry. Farmers still largely rely on traditional methods of fish farming. Water quality management, despite its importance to successful aquaculture, is often left to guesswork and physical observation.

Aquamet developed a water quality probe to help fish farmers optimize their fish yields. This probe works remotely and sends water quality readings to fish farmers via SMS and a mobile app. It continuously tracks water quality — dissolved oxygen, pH levels, and temperature—in fish farms and alerts farmers to any potential problems before they escalate.

The Aquamet mobile app, currently available on Google Play, also offers assistive farm management tools such as feed estimator, record keeping, as well as advisory and management tips.

Aquamet CEO and co-founder Frank Owusu says his experience working with fish farmers inspired him to start the company. As a research and teaching assistant at KNUST’s Department of Fisheries and Watershed Management, he worked with farmers who lost large amounts of their stock due to poor water quality.

Owusu founded Aquamet with two others, Priscilla Brempong, who leads marketing at the startup, and Gabriel Lorlornyo, who is in charge of hardware and software design. He says his goal is to digitize the aquaculture sector in Ghana and Africa as a whole and build a platform for the production, procurement, marketing, and distribution of fish.

Owusu and Aquamet have received a number of accolades for their innovation from organizations like the International Sustainable Chemistry Collaborative Centre (ISC3) and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

It is working with 500 fish farmers, mostly pond and cage farmers, in the Eastern Region of Ghana. According to the startup, some of these farmers have reported a 10-15% increase in yields. It promises to help more farmers reduce high mortalities and harvest more fish. It has also announced plans to expand to Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, targeting more than 20,000 fish farmers over the next five years.

A water quality monitoring system is relatively easy to implement with the right technical know-how. The broader challenge is getting a large number of traditionally tech-cautious farmers to implement a new technology.