Invasive water hyacinth threatens fishers’ livelihoods on popular Kenyan lake

For someone who fishes for a living, nothing says a bad day like spending over 18 hours on a lake and taking home nothing. Recently, a group of fishermen were said to be stranded on Kenya's popular Lake Naivasha for that long and blamed the water hyacinth that has taken over large parts of it. The water hyacinth is native to South America and was reportedly introduced to Kenya in the 1980s “by tourists who brought it as an ornamental plant,” said Gordon Ocholla, an environmental scientist at Mount Kenya University. The East African Journal of Environment and Natural Resources estimated in a 2023 study that the invasion of water hyacinth in Kenyan lakes — including Africa's largest lake, Lake Victoria — has led to annual losses of between $150 million and $350 million in Kenya's fishing, transport and tourism sectors. “Such solutions and others that have been applied by similar start-ups may be promising and actually work, but if they cannot be scaled to a higher level that matches the invasiveness of the water hyacinth, then the problem will still persist,” Ocholla said.