In recent years, Ukraine has actively embraced digital transformation as a cornerstone of governance reforms, aiming to replace cumbersome bureaucratic processes with streamlined, transparent, and effective digital solutions. Among these ambitious digital initiatives, the fisheries sector was highlighted as a key area for transformation, culminating in the launch of e-Fish—officially known as the Unified State Electronic System for Fisheries Management. The project promised revolutionary improvements, including enhanced transparency, real-time monitoring, efficient licensing procedures, and a comprehensive digital registry designed to modernize the oversight and management of the country’s valuable aquatic bioresources.
Initially hailed as a major step toward regulatory clarity and modernization, e-Fish garnered significant support and funding from international donors, most notably USAID, along with expert input from multiple development partners. However, several years after its introduction, serious questions have emerged about whether the platform meets even its basic operational expectations. According to a comprehensive assessment recently conducted by the National Association of Aquaculture and Fisheries Producers “Ukrfish,” the e-Fish system is not only failing to deliver on its promises but may actually be exacerbating the sector’s existing dysfunctions.
Far from streamlining processes, the current state of e-Fish introduces unnecessary complexity, leaving fisheries operators struggling with persistent technical problems, incomplete functionality, and limited technical support. Instead of facilitating compliance, the system’s shortcomings inadvertently push legitimate operators into noncompliance, exposing them to unjustified regulatory penalties and potentially fostering conditions ripe for corruption.
Given these significant shortcomings, it is crucial to critically evaluate whether the e-Fish platform represents a genuine digital reform or has devolved into another bureaucratic burden hindering Ukraine’s fisheries industry.
What is e-Fish?
e-Fish, officially the Unified State Electronic System for Fisheries Management, was launched under a cooperative memorandum involving the State Agency for Land Reclamation, Fisheries and Food Programs (DARg), the Eurasia Foundation, and the Eastern Europe Foundation. The system was developed entirely with international donor funding—most notably from USAID—with the ambitious goal of creating a comprehensive digital platform to streamline fisheries licensing, vessel monitoring, and reporting processes in Ukraine.
Key components of e-Fish include:
- Licensing Interface: A digital portal intended to simplify licensing procedures for fisheries operators.
- Vessel Monitoring Integration: Real-time tracking capabilities currently integrated with more than 1,400 registered vessels.
- Digital Journal: A module designed for daily catch tracking, theoretically eliminating the need for manual logging.
- Component Development: Carried out primarily by private contractor MK-Consulting and the NGO Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO).
However, despite its promising features and significant international backing, real-world application of e-Fish remains deeply problematic.
Critically, real fisheries operators—the primary intended users—were never properly consulted or included at any stage of the system’s design and development process. Producers, whose daily activities depend directly on this technology, were not given meaningful opportunities to provide feedback, voice concerns, or test usability during development phases.
Further complicating the issue, Ukraine’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food Policy introduced e-Fish as an “experimental” system via Cabinet of Ministers Resolution №1347. Initially positioned as a pilot to fine-tune the system gradually, this “experiment” abruptly transformed into compulsory regulation. Crucially, mid-way through the active fishing season, authorities suddenly altered the rules governing digital reporting and vessel monitoring—without providing fisheries operators adequate lead time or transitional support to adapt to the new requirements.
The consequences were predictably chaotic: fisheries businesses found themselves trapped between the old manual systems and an unreliable digital platform. Instead of streamlining regulatory compliance, e-Fish created confusion, increased administrative burdens, and subjected operators to unjustified penalties due to unavoidable non-compliance during this abrupt regulatory shift.
As of May 2025, e-Fish claims 1,723 registered users, yet its day-to-day functionality remains fundamentally flawed, causing significant operational disruption and frustration among genuine fisheries producers across Ukraine.
What’s Gone Wrong?
1. The System Remains Unfinished and Overpriced.
Despite official use, e-Fish remains incomplete. The crucial third phase of development has never been implemented due to the lack of budget allocation. The infrastructure remains outdated and fully dependent on donor funding, leaving essential features indefinitely frozen and the backend fragile.
Our association has consulted several professional IT developers who have assessed that a fully functional digital fisheries management system—complete with robust frontend, reliable backend, web portal, and dedicated Android and iOS mobile apps—could be realistically developed, tested, and deployed within 2-3 months. The total estimated cost for this comprehensive solution would be under €50,000.
Shockingly, reliable industry sources and insiders suggest that BRDO has spent more than €250,000 of donor funds to deliver a system that currently provides only about 40% of the required functionality. This stark discrepancy raises serious questions about both cost-efficiency and procurement transparency.
2. Core Functionality Routinely Fails.
Users consistently report critical errors in essential operations. For instance, fisheries operators face frequent failures when uploading fishing journals—leading to incomplete or duplicated entries. The system regularly crashes under typical usage scenarios, and real-time technical support remains virtually nonexistent. Consequently, many operators are forced to maintain parallel paper records to avoid losing data entirely.
3. Legal Compliance is Actively Undermined.
Under Ukrainian law, accurate digital logging is mandatory to maintain compliance and avoid legal penalties. However, persistent e-Fish system crashes or incomplete drop-down menus (such as missing options for officially permitted fishing tools or particular species) directly expose legitimate fishers to unjustified legal fines. Thus, despite their full intention to comply, fishermen find themselves penalized due to technical issues entirely beyond their control.
4. Poor Oversight and Weak Vendor Accountability.
The vessel monitoring subsystem, currently maintained by a single tech vendor under a contract worth 68,000 UAH, continues to experience repeated technical breakdowns and disruptions. Despite these operational flaws, enforcement against vessels operating outside the legal framework remains weak and inconsistent, creating a paradoxical situation: law-abiding operators face continuous scrutiny, while violators often operate without consequences.
5. Elevated Risk of Corruption and Exploitation.
The ongoing dysfunction and confusion within e-Fish create fertile ground for corruption. Operators report instances where technical errors and unclear rules have been exploited to penalize legitimate users unfairly, while simultaneously allowing “ghost companies”—entities lacking any legitimate fishing capacity—to participate unchecked in official auctions and resource allocation processes. This undermines transparency, creates unfair competitive conditions, and weakens overall trust in the regulatory system.
These concrete examples highlight the urgent need for a comprehensive and independent review of e-Fish, emphasizing transparency, efficiency, and genuine user involvement.
What’s Needed?
Ukrfish and its partners are calling for a full, independent audit and rethinking of the e-Fish system—led by real users, industry experts, and independent developers, not by donors, consultants, or bureaucrats who have never filed a fishing journal or stood on a quay.
The current system was created without involving those who actually rely on it in their daily work. It reflects the perspective of office administrators, not fisheries professionals. It’s time to reverse this logic.
Key priorities and proposals:
1. Full public disclosure of procurement, contracts, and development history.
All project documentation related to e-Fish—including budgets, donor contributions, timelines, and deliverables—must be made public. Stakeholders have the right to understand how much was spent, by whom, and on what.
2. Clear legal safeguards to protect users from system failure.
The government must guarantee that operators are not fined or held liable for technical failures beyond their control. Users should not be penalized when the platform is unavailable, unstable, or lacks legally mandated reporting options.
3. Introduction of a hybrid paper-digital fallback system.
Until e-Fish operates reliably, fisheries operators must have the legal right to submit paper-based documentation during technical outages or when the system fails to perform.
4. Open API access to enable independent solutions.
To unlock innovation, e-Fish must provide an open and secure API, allowing independent Ukrainian developers to create external applications and mobile tools that interact directly with the core system. This is standard practice in any modern e-governance system and would enable agile, user-focused solutions to be deployed quickly.
5. Ukrfish is ready to develop a free mobile app for users.
We have formally offered to develop and donate a mobile application to the Ministry, at no cost to the state. This app would be created by and for fisheries professionals—not for bureaucrats sitting in warm offices. It would prioritize simplicity, speed, and usability for operators in the field, working in real-time, often in difficult conditions.
6. Full redesign of the user interface.
The current UX/UI is not only outdated—it is illogical and unintuitive. Visibility is poor, workflows are cumbersome, and the system fails to reflect how fishers actually operate. As a result, most companies are forced to hire an additional IT-savvy staff member just to use e-Fish on their behalf. This is an unacceptable barrier for small and medium producers.
7. Ban on shell companies in auctions.
The system must include real checks to prevent shell companies—those without vessels, crews, or infrastructure—from participating in resource allocation auctions. These actors distort competition and damage the integrity of the sector.
8. Transparent assessment of cost-effectiveness.
Ukrfish has consulted several professional software developers. Their conclusion: a fully functional, modern e-Fish alternative—including frontend, backend, web dashboard, Android and iPhone apps—could be built and deployed in 2 to 3 months for less than €50,000. In contrast, according to publicly discussed estimates, over €250,000 has already been spent to deliver less than half of the necessary functionality. This gap demands explanation.
A fisheries management system must serve the people who feed the nation—not the paperwork that buries them.
Ukrfish stands ready to support meaningful reform and technical modernization that puts users, not administrators, at the center of digital transformation. Let us work together to ensure that technology becomes a solution, not a new obstacle.
A Call to Our International Partners
If Ukraine is serious about aligning its fisheries sector with EU standards on sustainability, traceability, and environmental protection, then digital tools like e-Fish must work—not just in theory, but in practice.
Digitization should never serve as a smokescreen for dysfunction, corruption, or regulatory abuse. It must empower real users, improve compliance, and reduce administrative burdens—not create new ones. Unfortunately, the current e-Fish system does the opposite.
We call on international donors, foundations, and technical partners who have supported Ukraine’s digital transition to take a closer look—not just at what has been promised, but at what has actually been delivered.
At Ukrfish, we are not only committed to advocating for reform—we are ready to build solutions.
We have the technical expertise, the network of end users, and the institutional infrastructure to coordinate and deliver a fully functional, user-friendly application for fisheries operators across Ukraine. Our proposed app will be:
- Designed with real fishers and aquaculture producers in mind
- Built in full compliance with legal and reporting requirements
- Integrated (via API) with any future e-Fish core platform
- Free to use for our members and built entirely at-cost with full transparency
We are prepared to manage this development process independently or in partnership, ensuring all funds are used efficiently and that outcomes are delivered on time and in full.
This is a call for real cooperation.
We welcome financial support, access to technical resources, or strategic collaboration with institutions that share our vision for a transparent, fair, and modern fisheries sector in Ukraine.
Let’s move beyond declarations. Let’s deliver results.
Contact us to discuss how you can contribute to a solution that finally puts users—and not administrative overhead—at the center of Ukraine’s fisheries management system.
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