SAFAL

Context

• Assam and Odisha have large areas of ponds and long fish-farming traditions, but yields stay low. Farmers lack good fingerlings and feed, technical know-how and access to government schemes, which usually require them to be organised into producer groups.
• SAFAL, Sustainable Aquaculture for Food and Livelihood, is the local name for GIZ's project Food Security through Integrated Aquaculture, part of its Global Programme on Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture. BMZ funded it, and GIZ ran it with the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying and the fisheries departments of Assam and Odisha from May 2021 to July 2025, on a €6.1M budget. It was built to complement the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana.

Sandeep's part

• Designed and built SAFAL's delivery system, eight parts that work together.
• Community resource persons: farmers chosen by their own producer organisations and self-help groups, trained to advise up to 25 neighbours each and paid through their institutions. 140+ trainers and 500+ CRPs trained between 2021 and 2023, now advising more than 7,000 farmers.
• Aquaculture Business School: GIZ's Farmer Business School adapted to fish for the first time in India, with the Ministry of Rural Development and the Assam State Rural Livelihoods Mission. 20 trainers trained in Assam in 2024.
• Knowledge products: the Farmer's Handbook, Training Manual for Trainers, Farm Record Book, flipbooks and posters, in local languages and usable without electricity.
• FIRMS: a QR code on every Farm Record Book links a farmer's records to an open-source monitoring system that producer organisations and the fisheries department can read.
• Community information centres: 10 centres and 20 satellite centres for scheme applications, market prices, internet access and training.
• A Participatory Guarantee System guideline for freshwater aquaculture, implemented with 500 women farmers in Morigaon district, Assam.
• An aqua-entrepreneurship model and guidebook, and state multi-stakeholder platforms in Assam and Odisha, built over about 18 months.
• Linked SAFAL with GIZ's Promotion of Solar Water Pumps project (IGEN-PSWP) to bring solar pumps, aerators, refrigerators and dryers into pond aquaculture. SAFAL hosted the February 2023 workshop with PSWP, the Assam fisheries department, NABARD and WorldFish that set the indicators for this work.

What changed

• More than 6,000 farmers were trained in resource-conserving aquaculture and financial literacy.
• Sonmoni Devi, of Dorongi village on the Brahmaputra's south bank, trained as a CRP through the Borbeel Farmer Producer Company in Nagaon. She grew her pond from 0.06 to 0.20 hectares, raised her harvest from 150 to 200 kilograms and doubled her fish income between 2023 and 2024. She now supports 17 fish farmers, 15 of them women.
• GIZ presented SAFAL and PSWP together as one model for sustainable aquaculture at Matsya Pranee Samavesh, the Government of Odisha's fisheries fair in Bhubaneswar, 16 to 18 February 2024.
• GIZ published SAFAL as a solution on PANORAMA, the platform for documenting what works in conservation and development.

In others' words