Prof. Isaac Okyere

Dr. Isaac Okyere is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Science, School of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana, and also the Academic Coordinator for the World Bank funded Africa Centre of Excellence in Coastal Resilience (ACECoR), UCC. Dr. Okyere has over a decade of experience working within the fields of fisheries and coastal management in Ghana and the West African sub-Region at large. He had his BSc.(in 2007) , M. Phil (in 2011) and PhD (in 2015) degrees at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) in Ghana where he specialised in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, with mentorships in ecological and fisheries modeling at the Murdoch University and CSIRO-Marine Sciences – both in Australia. He has also taken short courses in fish stock assessment and 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, Australia. I have worked with the WorldFish Center (Malaysia) as a PhD student on a past USAID-Ghana Integrated Coastal and Fisheries Governance (ICFG) project implemented 2009-2014, the USAID/UCC Fisheries and Coastal Management Project (2014-2020), as well as partly on the USAID-Ghana Sustainable Fisheries Management Project (SFMP – 2014-2021) on various activities focused on community and fisher engagement, collaboration and capacity building for fisheries management and coastal conservation. He is also a Co-Lead for the USAID Women Shellfishers and Food Security project being implemented in all eleven countries along the West African coast from Senegal to Nigeria. Dr. Okyere collaborates with local fisheries and coastal oriented NGOs to implement district level and community-based actions focused on achieving effective governance and sustainable management of fisheries resources in Ghana through participatory research and citizen science. As a Fisheries Scientist and Coastal Ecosystems Ecologist, Dr. Okyere engages in a number of research activities from biological and ecological to fisheries and socio-economic research. I am leading ongoing works on using industry-science collaboration to improve fisheries resources research, management and sustainable exploitation of fish stocks in Ghana, and improving women-led coastal shellfisheries in the Gambia and all coastal countries along the West African coast. I am also supervising postgraduate students on fisheries research in Nigeria, Liberia, Eritrea and Kenya. Dr. Okyere has over twenty peer-reviewed articles in local and international journals (mostly indexed in Thomson Reuters, Scopus and Web of Science), one book chapter and four conference papers. He has passion for coastal ecosystems and fisheries conservation, and is currently supervising ten masters and four PhD students.