"Tiny Fish, Massive Gap": Why Kapenta Is Africa's Next Trade Category"

The Kapenta Opportunity: Africa's Overlooked Protein Commodity

An Africa Brew Brief Investigation

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Long before "protein security" became a policy buzzword, small pelagic fish were already doing the job — quietly, cheaply, and almost invisibly to the export economy. Kapenta is the clearest example of a commodity Africa has never had to promote, because millions of people already buy it every week. The question this brief asks is simple: why has one of the continent's most reliable protein trades never been built into a branded, cross-border industry?

## What Exactly Is the Product

Kapenta is the trade name for two closely related small, sardine-like freshwater fish — *Limnothrissa miodon* and *Stolothrissa tanganicae* — both members of the herring family, native to Lake Tanganyika. The same or near-identical fish carries different names depending on where it's landed: kapenta in Zambia and Zimbabwe, ndagala in Burundi and eastern DRC, dagaa in Tanzania, matemba or usipa around Lake Malawi. Traders and processors group all of these under one umbrella: small pelagic freshwater fish.

The fish themselves are tiny — *Stolothrissa* rarely exceeds 10cm, *Limnothrissa* about 17cm — fast-maturing, and travel in dense surface shoals that react strongly to light. That single trait shapes the entire industry. Kapenta is caught almost exclusively at night, from rigs fitted with bright lamps that draw the shoals into lift nets or purse seines, a method that has barely changed since the fishery began.

## History of Production

Kapenta is not native to most of the waters that now define its industry. It comes from Lake Tanganyika, shared by Tanzania, Burundi, the DRC and Zambia, fished there for well over a century. Its move into Southern Africa was deliberate: when Lake Kariba was created on the Zambezi in the early 1960s as a hydroelectric reservoir shared by Zambia and Zimbabwe, fisheries scientists introduced *Limnothrissa miodon* between 1967 and 1968 to fill an empty ecological niche. It worked. Fish yield on Kariba rose from around 5.6kg per hectare in 1968–69 to over 340kg per hectare by the mid-1980s, and by the 1990s the fishery was producing more than 30,000 tonnes a year — one of the largest inland fisheries on the continent, built almost from nothing.

That early success also planted the industry's core tension. Zimbabwe built a licensed, commercial rig-based fishery; Zambia grew a much larger population of small-scale artisanal operators. Both models still run in parallel today, and both now face the same pressure — more rigs chasing a biologically capped resource, compounded by climate-driven shifts in lake temperature and productivity that researchers now link to declining catches since the 2000s.

## Uses of the Product

Kapenta's value has always been affordable protein at scale. Because the fish are small, oily, and spoil within hours, almost the entire catch is preserved immediately — traditionally by sun-drying on lakeshore racks, with salting, hot-smoking and deep-frying as secondary methods. Dried, it keeps for months without refrigeration, which is exactly why it became the default protein for lower-income households across landlocked Southern and Central Africa, where marine fish is expensive or simply unavailable.

Beyond the plate, kapenta and its relatives feed a second, larger economy: animal feed. Whole dried fish and processing offcuts are core raw material for fishmeal, the high-protein ingredient behind poultry, swine, and increasingly aquaculture feed formulation across the continent.

## What CPG Products Can It Make

Today, kapenta is sold almost entirely as raw commodity — loose dried fish in open sacks at wholesale markets. That's exactly where the opportunity sits, because nearly every downstream category remains underdeveloped relative to demand:

- **Packaged dried/salted retail packs** — cleaned, graded, fixed-weight product, replacing the unstandardized loose-sack trade

- **Ready-to-eat seasoned snacks** — deep-fried, chilli-, onion- or spice-infused fish in consumer packs, a category already proven at scale in the related omena trade

- **Fish powder and fortified flour** — milled kapenta blended into maize, cassava or millet flour for extruded snacks, porridge fortificants, and infant/maternal nutrition products

- **Fish stock cubes and seasoning** — a direct, largely untapped substitute for imported bouillon in West and Central African cooking

- **Fishmeal and fish oil for animal feed** — the highest-volume industrial use, feeding poultry, swine, and Africa's fast-growing aquaculture sector

- **Fish sauces and pastes** — a condiment category well established in Southeast Asia and almost entirely unexplored on the continent

- **Pet food and specialty feed ingredients** — an emerging, higher-margin outlet as African pet ownership and commercial pet food manufacturing grow

## Africa and Global Market Potential

Global fishmeal — the largest addressable market for kapenta-type species — was valued at roughly **US$11–12 billion in 2025**, projected to reach **US$21–24 billion by 2034–2035** at a compound annual growth rate of **6–8%**. Demand is anchored by the expansion of global aquaculture, which relies on fishmeal for salmon, shrimp and carp feed, alongside steady poultry and swine growth. The Middle East & Africa fishmeal market alone was worth approximately **US$0.47 billion in 2025**, growing at around **4.3%** — still a fraction of Asia-Pacific's 42–45% global share, which is precisely the gap African-origin supply has room to close.

On the human-consumption side, Africa's dried and salted fish market has grown at a steady average of roughly **1.6% a year between 2012 and 2024** — modest, but durable, reflecting its role as a food-security staple rather than a discretionary purchase. That kind of demand base rewards value-addition far more than it rewards raw volume growth.

The scale of existing informal demand is easy to underestimate. On Lake Tanganyika alone, annual catch across the four riparian states has historically ranged between **167,000 and 179,000 tonnes**, valued at only around **US$26 million** at first sale — a figure that dramatically understates real consumer value once the fish is dried, transported and retailed. Sub-Saharan Africa's average per-capita fish consumption sits around **6.6kg a year**, well below Uganda's 10kg and Tanzania's 11.9kg, pointing to real headroom for supply-driven consumption growth in underserved markets.

## Which African Countries Produce It

Zambia works the fishery hardest across three water bodies — Lake Kariba, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Mweru — with a large, artisanal-dominated rig fleet on Kariba that exports to Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Rwanda. Zimbabwe fishes the other half of Kariba through a more tightly licensed commercial rig fishery, though its catch has fallen sharply, from a peak above 40,000 tonnes a year to roughly 5,200 tonnes in 2022, as overcapacity has pushed the resource past sustainable limits.

On Lake Tanganyika itself, Tanzania is the region's largest dagaa exporter, with the lake historically contributing 55,000–80,000 tonnes a year to its catch. The DRC pulls in some of the largest raw volumes on the same lake — historically 50,000–90,000 tonnes — yet remains, paradoxically, a net importer of processed dried fish, a sign of a missing processing layer rather than a shortage of fish. Burundi is a smaller but meaningful producer, with 21,000–24,000 tonnes historically, and its ndagala commands a price premium over Lake Victoria dagaa in regional markets.

Kenya sits outside the kapenta family strictly speaking — its Lake Victoria fishery produces omena rather than true kapenta — but it has built the most advanced value-addition and export infrastructure anywhere in the region, including direct exports to China. Uganda, also on Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, is the region's second-largest dagaa exporter after Tanzania. Malawi runs a significant domestic usipa and matemba fishery on Lake Malawi, focused mainly on local consumption, while Mozambique's smaller Cahora Bassa fishery occasionally supplies Zambia's import needs.

Rwanda, despite having no major kapenta fishery of its own, sits at the centre of the trade as the region's principal re-export corridor: an estimated 80% of dried dagaa imported into Rwanda from Lake Victoria is re-exported informally into eastern DRC through the Cyangugu/Bukavu and Gisenyi/Goma crossings.

## The InterAfrica Potential

Kapenta's story maps closely onto Africa One Group's own footprint. It is a cross-border commodity by nature — caught in one country, dried in another, consumed in a third — exactly the kind of trade corridor Kigali, as Africa HQ, is positioned to serve. Rwanda's existing role as a transit and repackaging hub for dagaa and ndagala into eastern DRC points to a natural entry: aggregation, quality standardization, and formal re-export, turning today's informal, sand-contaminated, inconsistently-graded bulk trade into a branded, quality-assured product line.

For the trade division, the opening is a packaged, graded, branded dried-fish and fish-snack line across the East and Southern African corridor already touched by existing agribusiness trade work. For hospitality, kapenta-based products — properly branded rather than sold as anonymous commodity — offer a genuine "taste of the region" retail and F&B opportunity, echoing the growing omena snack category in Kenya. For cold-chain operations, kapenta is largely a dry-chain commodity, but higher-value fresh and frozen value-packs already sold in parts of the region represent a smaller, complementary line worth scoping alongside the East African corridor.

## Producer Gaps and Opportunities

The fishery itself is fundamentally supply-constrained — Lake Kariba's maximum sustainable yield has been modelled at roughly **23,000–24,000 tonnes a year**, a ceiling long since reached and, on the Zimbabwean side, exceeded to the point of stock decline. That means the opportunity isn't "catch more fish." It's almost entirely downstream:

- **Standardization** — Kenya's omena market shows the constraint clearly: fish sold loose, mixed with sand and debris, with no consistent quality tier separating human-grade from feed-grade product

- **Processing infrastructure** — the DRC pulls in some of the largest raw catch volumes on Lake Tanganyika, yet remains a net importer of processed dried fish — a missing mid-stream layer, not a raw-material shortage

- **Storage and drying logistics** — post-harvest loss stays high across the value chain, particularly in rainy seasons when sun-drying is unreliable

- **Branded consumer products** — nearly the whole market remains undifferentiated commodity trade; a single Chinese-invested omena snack facility in Kenya reportedly generates billions of shillings in sales, proof of the margin available to whoever moves first from raw commodity to packaged product in a given corridor

- **Formalization of cross-border trade** — the scale of informal re-export through Rwanda into DRC represents real volume generating no formal trade data, tax base, or brand value for anyone in the chain

- **Sustainable management** — Zambia and Zimbabwe are working on a joint vessel-monitoring and licensing regime for Lake Kariba, a regulatory shift worth tracking closely, as it will shape future raw-material access and pricing

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**Africa Brew Brief** is Africa One Media's investigative series on African agribusiness and trade.