The Iron Ladies of Lake Tanganyika

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

By the time the sun has fully risen, the fishermen of the villages along Lake Tanganyika are already wrapping up the day’s work. Today’s catch was hauled in before twilight could bleed into the morning, and most fish vendor stalls set up by the beach have already been shuttered. 

Under the scorching sun, women are among the few with a job yet to finish. 

Around mid-morning in Kibirizi, a town on the lake’s Tanzanian side, Jaqueline Raphael monitors a batch of perch being smoked over a hearth. The fish, known locally as mikebuka, are wrapped like rings around a stick balanced on its ends above the kiln. Raphael tends to the hearth, switching out firewood and batches of fish. She explains the process through occasional sneezes and coughing bouts before excusing herself. After two consecutive days of this work, stooping over the fumes rising from smoldering charcoal, her chest is congested, and her mind has grown foggy from a headache.

“It feels like I have the flu,” she said.

In Lake Tanganyika, an enormous freshwater body in East Africa demarcating the borders between Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia, men deliver catches while the vast majority of processing is done by women like Raphael. Fresh catches need to be prepared for the households and exporters who buy them, with most of the processing done by laying fish out to dry and harden under the sun or smoking in rudimentary kilns built from mudblocks. 

Sardines laid out to dry in a high-efficiency solar tent in Kibirizi, Tanzania.

Many conventional processing methods have adverse health effects, but beyond this, the traditional position of women in the lake’s fishing economy is an unenviable one. This is despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of the lake’s processing work, a critical step that helps preserve quality and minimize losses, is done by women, according to a 2023 report on Lake Tanganyika’s gender dynamics by FAO, the Food & Agriculture Organization, a UN agency. As processors and crucial brokers at the midpoint of the local fisheries value chain, few women have any control over either the procurement of fish or its final sale, leaving their economic security and personal safety at the mercy of others. For the majority of women living by Lake Tanganyika, the gendered division of labor remains as real as it has been for generations, and its consequences continue to be laid bare. 

With climate change and overfishing threatening the longevity of the lake’s fisheries, men can turn to more employment alternatives or simply move elsewhere to fish. However, cultural, financial, and legal hurdles make economic diversification more challenging for women. Declining fisheries in Lake Tanganyika have trapped many women in vicious cycles of abuse and poverty while revealing an uncomfortable truth: When economic conditions harden, women are more likely to be left behind.

Faced with these challenges, a rising class of entrepreneurial women are using new technologies and work cooperatives to transcend traditional jobs and have a greater say in the fisheries economy. Some are even leaving fish processing behind entirely to start their own innovative businesses. The women of Lake Tanganyika are not waiting to be rescued—they are making their own waves. 

Ladies of the lake

Fish have always been a part of Betina Francis Tito’s life. As a child, Tito, known as Bilo in her hometown of Kibirizi, used to catch them on the shore. Her mother was a professor, and she grew up to be one too. 

In 2021, Bilo noticed a swollen lump on her throat, likely due to years of inhaling dust and smoke while processing, she told More to Her Story. The growth became life-threatening, forcing Bilo to leave her processing business behind to seek medical treatment in Dar es Salaam, a major city on the other side of the country. 

During her eight-month absence, the little processing equipment she had was taken by people who thought she would die in Dar es Salaam, Bilo said. Without support, she instantly became vulnerable to the familiar cycles of poverty and abuse in the lake’s fisheries sector upon her return. 

“The hospital told me I couldn’t be exposed to smoke or dust anymore, but I had to work,” she said.

A 2022 study by the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on fish smoking in Ghana revealed traditional kilns — similar to those used by Bilo in Tanzania — led to an “elevated health burden” for processors, raising the risk for impaired vision, respiratory illnesses, memory loss, and more.

Since 2020, FAO has invested in Lake Tanganyika through FISH4ACP, a global initiative aimed at improving fisheries and aquaculture value chains. Part of the program involves supporting women by equipping them with better tools and training to create successful businesses. Bilo was among the first to receive new processing technologies that transformed her business in a matter of months. 

One is a greenhouse-like structure called a “solar tent,” where fish dry in insulated tents protected from the elements and on racks high enough off the ground to avoid dust and other impurities. Solar tents dry catches faster and are easier to keep pristine, extending the shelf life of fish. FISH4ACP also provided Bilo with a specialized oven and a large furnace with a metal hood resembling a grill that minimizes fumes while smoking fish, reducing losses and the amount of smoke she breathes in.

Today, Bilo’s monthly profit is more than double what it was before receiving the solar tent and oven. Within six months of using the new equipment, Bilo established 10 permanent customers throughout Tanzania who buy and sell her fish, providing her family with a steady income stream. 

By owning her own business, Bilo has chipped away at the steep gender pay gap that plagues communities around Lake Tanganyika, where women’s wages can be as much as nine times lower than men’s. She is also no longer exposed to exploitative practices women are often subject to, including notorious “sex-for-fish” transactions, a common challenge according to Bilo. These exchanges involve fishers demanding sexual favors in exchange for their catches, a dynamic researchers have linked to higher rates of early pregnancies and child marriages and faster spread of venereal disease.

“There’s a lot of iron ladies here,” Hashim Muumin, an FAO officer based by Lake Tanganyika, said of Bilo and other women starting to take the lake’s economy by storm. 

Woman sorting sardines on drying rack in Katonga, Tanzania.

Beyond global initiatives, national work collectives representing women in fisheries have opened chapters by the lake in recent years, improving women’s chances at competing in the fisheries economy. 

Tanzania’s constitution enshrines gender equality, but in practice, remote communities like those by Lake Tanganyika tend to follow forms of customary law, a set of norms informed by localized traditions and customs. Under these structures, women are usually unable to own land or access financing, but work associations allow women to pool resources, develop entrepreneurial skills, and collectively submit concerns to officials.

But benefits are slow to trickle down. More than 80 percent of female workers are not members of any association, according to FAO’s report. For these women, headwinds created by shrinking catches due to the knock-on effects of climate change remain all too real. 

Catches in Lake Tanganyika have declined as much as 50 percent over the past three decades, according to one 2023 study, largely due to climate change and overfishing. Last summer, the Tanzanian government, for the first time, closed its side of the lake to fishing activity to help fish repopulate, but the standstill disrupted processors’ business. Entrepreneurs like Bilo, who could store fish for longer periods, survived the closure, but few processors had this luxury. With annual closures likely to become a recurring theme in Lake Tanganyika due to fish shortages, some women are searching for opportunities beyond the fisheries industry.

In Rukoma, a small village nestled between the lake and Tanzania’s towering Mahale mountain range, entrepreneurship is thriving thanks to an innovative financing model. In 2016, the global non-profit The Nature Conservancy helped start a community conservation bank in the village. Members contribute to a common fund of about 100 million Tanzanian shillings, or about $40,000 USD. Villagers can take out loans to fund different business ventures. Of the bank’s 44 members, 28 are women.

Fishers, processors, and vendors gather at a market in Katonga, Tanzania.

By 2030, population and economic growth will double Tanzania’s demand for fish, according to a 2021 report from WorldFish, presenting economic opportunities for all members of the fisheries value chain. But without careful management and solutions that take gender into account, women may be pushed out.

Gender gaps manifest in food production worldwide, but few countries address them. From a 2023 analysis of food systems policy announcements in 68 countries, FAO found that only 19 percent explicitly mention gender. Advocates warn that failing to account for these differences can carry a high cost. As officials in Lake Tanganyika strive to avoid a collapse of fisheries resources, they risk swapping one crisis for another.

In Lake Tanganyika, lake closures, population growth, and climate change are drastically reshaping fisheries. Whether fisheries enter an intractable decline or adapt to new circumstances, women are likely to receive the short end of the stick without measures to elevate them.

“[Women are] excluded from the more lucrative, longer-distance trading. They’re left with what’s left over in the small local market,” said Jennifer Gee, a fisheries officer at FAO who focuses on gender issues.

But the women of Lake Tanganyika have dealt with change before. As a young woman, Bilo laid her fish out to dry in the sand. She later learned how to dry fish on raised racks and then how to operate efficient ovens and greenhouses, creating a thriving business that ships fish all over the country. With a helping hand, “iron ladies” like Bilo won’t just survive the changing tides — they’ll be the ones shaping them.

“When there’s challenge, there’s opportunity,” she said.