Bridging Digital Divides: How PescaData is Connecting Small-Scale Fishing Cooperatives to the Blue Economy

In coastal communities across Latin America, small-scale fishers face a paradoxical reality. While they play a crucial role in sustainable ocean management, local food security, the generation of data, and the livelihoods of millions, they remain largely excluded from the financial resources needed to grow and adapt in the face of climate change. As digital technologies transform industries worldwide, could these tools offer a pathway to connect these vital communities with much-needed investment, and how should the data they generate be fairly managed?

The Hidden Backbone of Coastal Economies

Latin America is home to over 1.2 million small-scale fishers, with Mexico hosting more than 250,000 people organized into approximately 4,000 fishing cooperatives. These people aren’t just statistics – they represent communities that that contribute to food security and local economies and provide hundreds of thousands of downstream jobs. Despite their importance, these fishing cooperatives face two persistent challenges: access to capital, and adaptation to changing markets and environments. Traditional financial institutions typically overlook them due to perceived risks and a lack of standardized documentation about their practices and impacts. Meanwhile, impact investors and donors in the growing Blue Economy who want to support sustainable ocean initiatives struggle to identify and evaluate potential opportunities in this sector due to a lack of information on which to make safe investment decisions.

Digital Platforms as Bridges, Not Barriers

In this research project, we examine how digital platforms – specifically PescaData – can be leveraged to connect small-scale fishing cooperatives with impact investors and donors, creating new pathways for sustainable blue economy financing, while simultaneously ensuring fair data practices that respect data sovereignty and traditional ecological knowledge.

PescaData emerged as a pioneering digital platform that enables fishing communities to collect more accurate data to ensure sustainable fisheries. Since then, PescaData has evolved to provide software as a service to fishing cooperatives and to allow fishers to document their solutions to environmental and economic challenges. Since 2022, small-scale fishers have used it to document nearly 300 initiatives that contribute to multiple Sustainable Development Goals. 

Respecting Data Sovereignty in the Digital Age

One critical aspect of our research acknowledges the unique challenges of implementing digital tools in traditional cooperative settings. Unlike conventional tech implementations that often extract value from communities, PescaData´s approach centers on data sovereignty – the principle that fishing communities should maintain ownership and control over their data. As the PescaData case study demonstrates, a humanity-centric rather than merely user-centric approach is essential. This means designing with compassion and establishing clear governance around data from the very beginning. The data generated by fishing cooperatives represents not just information, but traditional knowledge accumulated over generations of resource management.

The fishers themselves have articulated clear principles for data governance in a cooperative model:

• Ownership: Fishers, as data producers, decide who has access and under what conditions.
• Transparency: Clear agreements on data use.
• Knowledge assessment: Highlighting fishers’ contributions and placing them in decision-making positions.
• Co-design: Ensuring the platform meets their specific needs.
• Security: Protecting collected data.

Building Digital Cooperatives for the Blue Economy

The Blue Economy – sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth – offers tremendous potential for coastal communities and is worth US$1.5 trillion globally. However, the context of Blue Justice has recently emerged to ensure that small-scale fishers are not excluded from this growth by more powerful and organized sectors that share their geographies, such as coastal tourism or offshore energy production and generation. Additionally, without proper structures that respect cooperative principles, there’s a risk that digital transformations could exacerbate rather than reduce inequalities.

Our research examines how fishing cooperatives function as institutional structures for receiving and managing blue economy funding. We’re asking critical questions: What capacity do fishing cooperatives need to manage external investment effectively? Why have investors historically avoided these cooperatives? How can digital platforms be optimized to facilitate investment flows while preserving cooperative values? By applying theories of platform cooperativism and community-based natural resource management, we’re working to ensure that digital tools embody cooperative principles while operating as software services that improve day-to-day management. The goal is not to impose technology on communities but to co-create solutions that amplify their existing strengths. We will build on previous learnings of ICDE which have explored the impact of digital platforms and cooperatives on finance, regenerative primary production, and the interface with between traditional cooperatives and the digital world, particularly in the Global South.

From Documentation to Investment

The potential of this approach is significant. When fishing cooperatives can effectively document their practices, governance structures, and impacts, they become visible to investors in ways previously impossible. Standardized, verifiable documentation can transform perceived risk into calculated opportunity. Our research will survey over 200 fishing cooperatives across Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean to profile existing solutions, governance structures, and investment readiness. We will interview impact investors and donors active in the blue economy to map their information needs and investment criteria. With this knowledge, we can develop prototype investment readiness profiles and standardized impact metrics that communicate value while respecting cooperative sovereignty.

The Broader Significance

This work advances the mission of economic democracy by examining how digital platforms can be designed to serve cooperative enterprises rather than extract from them. We aim to demonstrate how platform design can facilitate capital flows to cooperative enterprises while ensuring community ownership and control of digital infrastructure. The findings will contribute to both practical platform development and theoretical understanding of how alternative, cooperative economic models can operate in the context of climate change and sustainable development in the Global South.

As coastal communities worldwide face increasing climate impacts, connecting small-scale fishing cooperatives with responsible investment through appropriate digital tools could provide a model for resilience that respects traditional knowledge while embracing innovation. The blue economy need not leave small-scale fishers behind – with the right digital bridges, they can lead the way toward sustainable ocean management that benefits both people and planet.

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