Building digital infrastructure for SDG14

The situation

Comunidad y Biodiversidad — COBI — was founded in Mexico in 1999 by a small group of marine biologists. Over twenty years it built deep partnerships with thirty coastal communities, working bottom-up. Their former Executive Director, Dr Jorge Torre, once described the method plainly: they “go into the community for six months, drink coffee and just listen.”

Mexico has thousands of coastal communities and more than 300,000 small-scale fishers. COBI had reached thirty communities in twenty years. Reaching the rest at that rate was not arithmetic that worked.

Small-scale fishers carry an unreasonable load. They are relied on as stewards of the ocean and as contributors to local economies, and they are the first to absorb a market shock. COVID-19 made that visible twice over: international customers went first as supply chains closed, then domestic ones as businesses shut and tourism collapsed.

The financing gap for SDG 14 is estimated at $1.74 trillion. No single conservation organisation has the budget or the mandate to close it.

What ran

COBI invited us in to expand the reach of the technology they already had, and we quickly narrowed to PescaData — a logbook app fishers use to record their daily activity and catch. Stakeholder interviews, participatory design sessions with fishers, and working sessions with the COBI team pointed at something larger than an app.

The proposal was a shift COBI had to decide to make: to stop funding technology as a programme line and start treating it as infrastructure. That came with an organisational restructure to match. The initiative is now called Innovación Azul.

Three streams of work: an equitable business model with digital logbooks for cooperatives as the way in; a re-architected PescaData with the security and scalability to carry it, asks-and-offers between communities, and permit, compliance and boat-and-fisher management for cooperative administrators; and impact indicators connecting fishing logs to SDG and FAO reporting.

What it produced

PescaData became the thin end of a wedge rather than a reporting obligation. Fishers’ logs now serve the fisher first — permits, compliance, cooperative administration — and the conservation reporting comes out of the same entry rather than requiring a second one. Communities can see and trade solutions with their neighbours.

Work continued through 2022 into marine conservation ecosystem development across Mexico and the wider region, and into interoperability with aligned partner platforms.

What it shows

COBI stopped buying software for programmes and started building infrastructure that other organisations can join. That is the change we were engaged to produce, and it is the part we can account for.

How far it travels from here is COBI’s work, on COBI’s timeline, and we do not claim it. What we can say is that thirty communities in twenty years was a rate set by the method. The method now has infrastructure underneath it.