A key figure in south Senegal's oyster sector

10 February 2023, Dakar - She almost goes unnoticed among the women who have come to visit her from Senegal’s southern provinces of Casamance and Sine-Saloum to share experiences and best practices in oyster picking and farming. 

Yet Seynabou Diatta is one of the pillars of the local oyster industry. She has worked in oyster farming for 40 years and coordinates a group of about 60 women oyster farmers.  

The visit took place from 12 to 17 December 2022 in her village of Toubacouta. Seynabou Diatta shared her experience of organizational practices and on governance and management systems. When she makes her point, you can feel that she is a businesswoman and a leader.  

“We have organized ourselves to monitor our expenses and to evaluate our working time. This allows us to assess the value of the product and to set the price. In 2022, we made a profit of 2 million CFA francs (USD 3 280),” she says with pride.   

With the twelve women who participated in the visit, Seynabou also discussed ways to improve oyster production systems, marketing and shared her experience in processing and packaging fresh and dried oysters.  

“The main challenges we face are at sea,” she says. “Renting canoes is expensive. Then we suffer a lot of losses because of the water temperature and the salinity level of the areas.”  To meet existing and future challenges, she adds, more skills are needed.  

Leader, wife and mother 

Besides being a leader, Seynabou Diatta is also a wife and mother. Even if combining her role as a businesswoman and her marital responsibilities is not always easy, she knows how to reconcile both. “My husband accepts my sacrifices because he knows how they benefit our family”.  

Her daily struggle: helping three of her children find their way. “I have two boys and a girl, who were born deaf-mute. They don’t go to school but they help a lot in my work. They now master the entire oyster process,” she sighs. 

Seynabou is one of many women from southern Senegal, who do most of the work in the oyster sector. Oysters are essential to their livelihood, but their income is not always enough to feed their families. FISH4ACP works to make the Senegalese oyster value chain more productive and transform it into an engine of economic and social development, based on sustainable exploitation of oysters.