Biography

Dr. Isaac Okyere has over a decade-and-half of experience working within the fields of fisheries and coastal management in Ghana and the West African sub-Region at large. He currently is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Science, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana, and also the Academic Coordinator for the World Bank funded Africa Centre of Excellence in Coastal Resilience (ACECoR) programme, UCC. He specialised in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences from UCC, with mentorships in ecological and fisheries modeling at the Murdoch University and CSIRO-Marine Sciences in Australia. He has also taken short in leadership for fisheries management from the University Rhode Island- USA, and the UN Law of the Sea Convention from the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources Security (ANCORS) – University of Wollongong. Dr. Okyere teaches a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of fisheries biology, ecology and management including participatory approaches in fisheries and coastal-marine resources co-management. He supervises masters and PhD students from Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Eritrea and Kenya, and serves as a member of the African Union (AU-IBAR) African Fisheries Reform Working Group.

In marine resource stewardship, Dr. Okyere has initiated and led industry-science collaborative research activities through which state and non-state actors have collaborated in mapping cuttlefish breeding areas along Ghana’s coast, and assessed estuarine fisheries resources to provide data which have partly fed into development of the Ghana’s Fisheries Co-Management Policy. Dr. Okyere also partly initiated and currently coordinates the Ghana Marine Mammal By-catch and Strandings Network, a multi-stakeholder marine mammal reporting network that collects and provides daily data on marine mammal bycatch and strandings for policy reforms in Ghana. He also co-leads the Women Shellfishers and Food Security Project, a West-Africa wide women shellfisheries intervention, through which he works with women shellfishers in Ghana, The Gambia and other coastal West African countries to establish co-management groups for the management of shellfish resources in the sub-Region. He also leads activities supported by the US states Department, focused on combating the IUU fishing and other destabilizing impacts of distant water fishing vessels in the Gulf of Guinea.