African states back electronic monitoring for tuna fisheries transparency

Africa’s tuna fleets just got a sharper set of eyes. At the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, five coastal states, Kenya, Seychelles, Gabon, Tanzania and South Africa, announced commitments tied to electronic monitoring and tuna transparency, a move aimed squarely at the catch gaps that let illegal, unreported and underreported fishing slip through the cracks.

That matters because tuna is one of the ocean’s most valuable, mobile fisheries, and it is brutally hard to police with traditional observers alone. Electronic monitoring can record catches, gear use, discards and other at-sea interactions that crews and paper logs can miss or misstate. For fisheries managers, buyers and conservation groups, that means a better read on what is being taken, where it is being taken and under what conditions.

Kenya’s commitment was the biggest on the money side. The government said it would put $200 million behind electronic monitoring on all industrial fishing vessels in its waters and aims for 100% monitoring by 2030 using electronic monitoring and onboard observers. Seychelles went even more directly at tuna: it said it would join the Tuna Transparency Pledge and work toward 100% on-the-water monitoring across all industrial tuna vessels in its waters by 2027. Jan Robinson, chief executive of the Seychelles Fisheries Authority, said transparency is essential not only for conservation but also for the integrity and competitiveness of Seychelles’ tuna sector.

The timing sharpened the point. The conference, held from June 16 to 18, 2026, was the first Our Ocean Conference hosted on African soil, and organizers said more than 100 governments, businesses and civil society groups announced 320 commitments worth $6.4 billion. The theme, “Our Ocean, Our Heritage, Our Future,” fit the mood on the floor: this was less about symbolism than about putting enforcement tools into the water.

The Nature Conservancy said the African pledges fit a broader push toward full electronic monitoring, with country efforts ranging from pilot projects and system development to formal national commitments. That same push is already being measured through the Tuna Transparency Pledge, launched in April 2024 and built around 100% on-the-water monitoring for industrial tuna vessels by 2027. By May 2025, TNC said countries representing more than 15% of the global tuna catch had signed on.

For anglers, this is not abstract policy talk. Better oversight means cleaner stock data, less room for dirty catches to distort the numbers, and more pressure for managers to protect tuna before the bite gets thin. When transparency becomes the rule instead of the exception, that changes what ends up in the water and on the line.