This session sets the tone and purpose for the 1-day assessment workshop. The two powerpoints provide the background on the I-FIT Tool and the context of the 1-day workshop in the entire process of identifying solutions to reduce IUU fishing.

Facilitators should emphasize that the focus of the day's discussion is to assess the prevalence, vulnerabilities, and responses to IUU fishing. Given the limited time and the number of activities scheduled for the day, we cannot accommodate discussions on operational concerns and/or issues in-depth. These can be discussed instead during the Problem Tree Analysis activity.

We formally start the IUU Fishing Assessment with the strengths rather than weaknesses and gaps. What is already being done to address the threats? Many LGUs and coastal communities are already doing something to curb the threat brought about by illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Much of these focus on "illegal" fishing.

In this session, facilitators will ask participants to list their on-going responses to IUU fishing in the Response Matrix. This will also be the first time that the IUU Fishing Index Scoring Form (Part B of the I-FIT Toolkit) will be shown to the participants. They will be asked to fill in the Profile pages and score the RESPONSES variables. If the LGUs did the pre-workshop preparations, the information to score the RESPONSES questions should be readily available.

While the previous session requires the most effort from participants, this session banks on the facilitators' skills in guiding participants to identify the causal links and reasons for the continued threats posed by IUU fishing in their waters. This session focuses on evaluating the vulnerabilities of the municipal waters to IUU fishing.

People have pre-conceived notions or opinions on the reasons behind IUU fishing. The facilitator should be able to go deeper than the surface or the obvious. This is an essential part of the workshop. The more detailed the answers are in the Problem Tree Analysis workshop, the more opportunities and options are available in identifying non-traditional solutions to the IUU fishing threats.

But do not worry if the results from the activities in this session are limited to the usual responses on the reasons for the persistence of IUU fishing. This can be revisited and expounded further during the IUU Fishing Reduction Planning Workshop or Part C of the I-FIT Tool. This is a separate, faciltated, one-day workshop focused on identifying solutions to the existing IUU fishing threats in the target areas.

Now that we have a good idea of the prevalence of IUU fishing in the municipal waters, the vulnerabilities that lead to the continued persistence of thes threats, and the responses being done to curb it, the last session briefly synthesizes the workshop outputs by connecting the existing responses with the identified vulnerabilities to IUU fishing.

This is not a full-on planning session. Instead, the intention is to gather the ideas that participants may have already started considering during the discussions and activities and collate them. The workshop outputs require further processing before the full assessment results could be presented.

The 1-day IUU Fishing Assessment workshops ends with identifying a common date / time to do the 1-day IUU Fishing Reduction Planning Workshop. This should be after three weeks to give time to encode, analyze, and process the IUU Fishing Assesssment workshop results for use in the next stage of the I-FIT process.