When Abdoulaye ‘Abdou’ Sady arrived exhausted and close to death at the shores of Tenerife in 2020, after spending approximately 14 days at sea in a wooden fishing boat, he thought he had left his troubles back home. Abdou had undertaken the perilous journey from the coastal town of Joal-Fadiouth, in the Thiès region of Senegal– after concluding he could no longer make a living through fishing. But five years later, the young man is still struggling as an undocumented immigrant in the Canary Islands.
With a coast on the Atlantic, artisanal fishery has always been the cornerstone of Senegal’s economy, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs and anchoring the government’s food security policy. The country is Africa’s second-largest fish producer and its major fishing hubs are concentrated along the coast.
