Technology Driven Decision Making among Inshore Fishers in the Central Region of Ghana: An Application of the Extended Technology Acceptance Model

Some few decades ago, Ghanaian inshore fishers depended largely on personal experiences and navigational skills to determine location, and also used the physical characteristics of the sea to predict fishing grounds. These were often misleading as many fishers often lost their way, especially on nights when the moon and stars were not visible. The introduction of the Sound Navigation and Ranging (SONAR) technology in recent years to help fishers detect changes in bathymetry, or help locate aggregations such as fish schools, underwater formations among others using sound waves transmitted from onboard the vessel has received little attention from the scientific community. With this equipment, inshore vessels could easily identify fish schools and uneven sea bottoms which facilitates purse seining. The study was conducted to determine how inshore fishers have adopted this SONAR technology and the factors influencing their adoption decisions. Little empirical data exist on adoption of this technology in Ghana. Utilising the extended technology acceptance model (TAM3), and a validated structured questionnaire, 161 inshore fishers were surveyed from three fishing communities in the Central region of Ghana. With the help of SmartPLS 4.0, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for data analysis. The results showed that, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and subjective norms accounted for 38% of the variance in the behavioural intention of inshore fishers to adopt the SONAR technology whiles behavioural intention predicted 8% of the variation in their use behaviour of the technology. We recommend that the Fisheries Commission of Ghana should leverage on the characteristics of the technology as ease and usefulness of the technology to drive its adoption in the study area and beyond.