In April 2019 members of the PaConDAA team from the UK and India joined colleagues in Bangladesh to run sensitization workshops on Better Management Practices for carp and shrimp farming. The week of events started at Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh where approximately 40 farmers and other delegates from Mymensingh and Rajshahi received advice and updates on fish farming.

After this first workshop the team travelled south to Khulna in southern Bangladesh where a second workshop was held with shrimp farmers, academics and students – again with the purpose of disseminating the latest best advice on shrimp farming. This second day was attended by approximately 80 delegates.

During this second workshop the PaConDAA team presented the official launch of the PaConDAA-funded Chingri Shrimp App https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.vanami&hl=en_GB

This phone app is based on the highly successful CIBA Vanami Shrimp App https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vanami.shrimpapp&hl=en_GB .

Our Bengali mobile phone app, which can be downloaded from the GooglePlay store provides shrimp farmers with the latest advice and recommendations on shrimp culture to their mobile phones, pond-side.

It includes advice on pond preparation and water treatment, stocking density and the diagnosis of typical infectious diseases. It also provides a ‘pond calculator’ to support the management of pond conditions before and during grow out. The platform also provides a free-text query form in which farmers can post questions relating to their crop performance, questions that will be answered by CIBA scientists in India within 48 hours. Using this disruptive technology it is hoped that farmers in remote locations will benefit from the latest advice at the pond side to help improve their crop performance during grow out.