Cretus Mtonga is a co-founder of Aqua-Farms and served as an Executive secretary for more than three years after being re-elected in the year 2021. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) focusing on the diversity and ecology of Tanzanian reef fishes. Between 2018 to 2020 Cretus attended an inter-university master’s program in Marine and Lacustrine Science and Management jointly organized by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Ghent University, and Universiteit Antwerpen majoring in conservation and ecosystem management. He participated in several projects pertaining to fishery management in Tanzania, aquaculture, and coastal and marine habitat conservation.

Currently, he is co-leading an octopus traceability project at Aqua-Farms with the Ministry of the fishery, Fishwise, USAID and Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT). His technical skills extend to the development of strategies, project development, management, monitoring, and evaluation. Cretus followed training on ocean science and management by the International Ocean Institute (IOI Canada 2018) at the Dalhousie University in Canada, the ResTore 2019 summer school at the University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland. And is an alumnus of the Global Ocean Deoxygenation Network (GO2ne) after attending the ocean deoxygenation summer school at Xiamen University in China.