Two presentations at a HOORC seminar today featured ongoing research by HOORC cultural tourism specialist Dr Susan Keitumetse and PhD candidate Phemo Kgomotso. Dr Keitumetse spoke about linking cultural and intangible heritage to tourism while Ms Kgomotso discussed how implementation of Ramsar and government policies are affecting the livelihoods of people in the Okavango Delta, with special...
ELDIS has alerted us to A review of participatory tools for natural resource management by authors from the University of Zimbabwe, the Center for Integrated Area Studies, Kyoto University and CIFOR and published part of a special feature, Navigating Trade-offs: Working for Conservation and Development Outcomes, in the open access journal Ecology and Society in 2007. The article...
Nineteen University of Botswana undergraduate students completed their work for HOORC's Winter Course this week, wrapping up their fieldwork assignments with presentations of the results of their research. This year's work included economics studies from Mbakile P. Seabe - Household attitudes and willingness to pay for the conservation of Lake Ngami, Botswana -- Kaelo Galeage - The impact of...
In
Economics,
Education,
public health,
fisheries,
Research,
Water Resources,
Vegetation,
Pollution,
Community Based Natural Resource Management,
Livelihoods,
Cultural Resources
The July 2008 issue of the Spatial Data Infrastructure - Africa Newsletter includes a story about the new FAO/IFAD report, Water and the Rural Poor: Interventions for Improving Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on the part that provides interactive maps. The other two parts of the report are titled Water, agriculture and rural livelihoods, and Interventions in water to improve...
ELDIS has alerted us to Navigating Amidst Complexity: a guide to implementing effective research and development to improve livelihoods and the environment, a guide from the Center for International Forestry Research. The guide was intended for researchers already involved in natural resource management but it is likely to also be of interest to implementers of natural resource management...
It is clear that many of today's poor will simply stay poor, even if economic growth is sustained. They are caught in one or more of five poverty traps: insecurity of life or livelihood; weak citizenship status; living in a deprived area; experiencing social discrimination; or held back by poor quality work. The second international Chronic Poverty Report, launched next week, shows that the poorest can be included in progress. ...(read more)...
Recently published as Number 6 in HOORC's Okavango Report Series is the Socio-economic survey of subsistence fishing in the Okavango Delta, Botswana by HOORC researchers Barbara Ngwenya and Keta Mosepele. The report argues for development of a national fisheries policy that could support and safeguard traditional basket fishing as an important livelihood activity in the Delta. Dr Ngwenya also...
ELDIS has alerted us to a new report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), Trading nature: a report, with case studies, on the contribution of wildlife trade management to sustainable livelihoods and the Millennium Development Goals. The report makes the point that the worldwide value of wildlife trade has been estimated at USD300 billion, which excludes the domestic trade that takes place...
A newly published article by HOORC economist Donald Kgathi and associate Julie Wilk, Risk in the Okavango Delta in the face of social and environmental change in Geojournal, looks at results of a survey of four villages in the Okavango Delta. Households were questioned about strategies they used to cope with recurring hazards such as drought, reduced flooding and animal disease. Results of the...
Masters and doctoral graduate students from the University of Florida's Faculties of Natural Resources and Environment and Geography are in and out of HOORC’s Library until the end of June. Led by Professor Mike Binford, the students are working on integrated research projects about land use and land cover change, socio-economic and livelihood strategies, and governance and institutional...
The Food and Agriculture Organisation summit is a vital step in a process that will develop through a series of events in 2008, including the G8 in Hokkaido in July, and the UN Call to Action on the Millennium Development Goals, in New York in September. At this stage, the Rome summit must deliver four things....(read more)...
The latest issue in the IIED's Participatory Learning and Action series has arrived in HOORC's Library. Immersions : learning about poverty face-to-face presents examples of participatory work intended to help development aid workers better understand the nature of poverty. Immersions are opportunities for development professionals to spend a period of time living with and learning from a poor...
Our land they took : San land rights under threat in Namibia, produced by the LEAD Project of the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia in 2006, makes a case for change in management of traditional lands, improved government planning and communication, and better training and support for implementing and enforcing the Communal Land Reform Act in Namibia. Colour maps illustrate locations of...
International environmental researchers and policymakers met at the 4th International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Congress held in Cape Town from 5 to 9 May 2008 to provide a forum for researchers to share scientific agendas, concerns and resources. The theme of the congress was “Sustainable Livelihoods in a Changing Earth System”. IGBP is an international research programme supporting...
Fishing on the Thamalakane River 2007
Integrating gender and livelihoods in a biodiversity project : a case study of the invisible stakeholders in the Okavango Delta Panhandle, a Master's thesis by Barbara Herrero Cangas for the University College London, looks at how women are participating in the fisheries co-management work of the BIOKAVANGO Project. Cangas' interviews with women who fish...
SARPN site
Douglas Thamage, recently appointed Community Conservation Officer, Fisheries, for the BIOKAVANGO Project, has alerted us to the web site of the Southern African Regional Poverty Network (SARPN) a non-profit organisation that aims to promote debate and knowledge sharing about poverty reduction processes and experiences in Southern Africa. The site allows browsing by country and by...
In the third of five blogs, I consider perspectives in three key areas- biofuels, climate change adaptation and water....(read...
Inception workshops for research to support the BIOKAVANGO project were held last week in Maun.
5th December 2007: Consultancy for the preparation of the Okavango Delta aquaculture guidelines. Water Farming Botswana is the consultant.
7th December 2007: Usufruct rights framework for joint management systems for fish and veldt products in the Upper Panhandle. S Thapelo Attorneys is the...
Poverty Environment Net focuses on capturing and sharing knowledge about poverty-environment linkages and good practices for addressing the environmental dimensions of poverty. The website was established through the Poverty Environment Program of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and contains links to documents, project descriptions and other resources from round the world. The site also links...
HOORC researchers Magole, Ngwenya and Mbaiwa (L to R) on Australian field trip HOORC researchers Dr Barbara Ngwenya , Innocent Magole, and Joseph Mbaiwa have just returned from the Fifth World Association for Sustainable Development (WASD) annual conference in Brisbane, Australia, where they presented papers about food security, indigenous knowledge and ecotourism in Botswana. Dr Ngwenya's...
It is a decade since mass tourism arrived in the picturesque northwest Yunnan towns of Dali, Lijiang and Zhongdian. But what of the villages and townships that some more adventurous tourists are beginning to visit? Julie Perng visits four communities that hope to embrace tourists without being overwhelmed by them.
In 2006, total receipts from tourism in Yunnan Province reached CNY 49.97 billion (USD 6.2 billion), almost 90% of which came from Chinese tourists. Receipts were up 16.7% on the previous year, and accounted for 12.5% of the provincial GDP. The tourism industry is clearly flourishing in one of China’s most ethnically, geographically, and biologically diverse......
Winter Course Student Presentations
HOORC’s 2007 class of University of Botswana Winter Course students were completing their project reports this week, following six weeks of intensive study and fieldwork in the Okavango Delta and Ngamiland. Seanokeng Kedisaletse and Boikanyo Mokgweetsi looked at different aspects of solid waste management with Solid waste management in Maun, and Household...
The Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks is soliciting expressions of interest for consultancies required for preparation of a World Bank/GEF supported project, Wildlife Conflict management and Biodiversity Conservation for Improved Rural Livelihoods. The project will be implemented in Botswana’s northern wetlands and related savannah ecosystems, and will focus on policy...
Grassland conservation and development cannot be separated from pastoralist culture and people, but decision-makers have ignored this over the past decades, academic experts and environmentalists say.
Some have started initiatives to bring people involved in grassland issues together for better policy-making and research.
At the 16th International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Conference to be held in Kunming in July 2008, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) will host a parallel meeting to discuss the grassland environment and changes in herders’......
Okavango Delta fishermen, Aquarap 2000 HOORC researchers Professor Donald Kgathi and Dr Barbara Ngwenya, with associate Dr Julie Wilk of Linkoping University, have published their research about how Okavango communities have coped with disruption of their economies by illness and environmental events. Shocks and rural livelihoods in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, recently published in...
Senior Chinese officials vowed to act on an international NGO and trade union report alleging abusive practices in four Pearl Delta factories contracted to produce goods for the 2008 Olympics, even as the report was overshadowed by shocking revelations of forced child labour in brick kilns in the provinces of Henan and......
HOORC researcher Joseph Mbaiwa is back in Maun from Texas A&M University where he is a PhD candidate. He will be working in the Okavango Delta for the next six months on his research project, Tourism Development, Rural Livelihoods and Conservation in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The study will analyse changes in livelihoods and in the use of three specific species – lions, the Hyphaene...
USAID’s FRAME web site, an online portal that provides access to the development organization’s natural resource management project documentation, is becoming a useful resource for links to work about CBNRM, poverty reduction and livelihoods. In addition to project documents, accessible by region and country, the site offers a special topic newsletter, partner pages, and...
The Practical Action website has a good summary of the reports of the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, including the latest update in the Up in Smoke series, Africa – Up in Smoke 2. This latest report uses short case studies to describe impacts of climate change that are already occurring in Africa, and discusses the ability of different communities to adapt to these impacts on...
Photo courtesy of Rachel Demotts
Today at HOORC, Research Fellow Dr Rachel Demotts presented her study of craftswomen from the Caprivi region of Namibia, Gendered Nature? Women’s Participation in Conservancies. Dr Demotts' study revealed that basketmaking and other crafts, mainly the province of women in Caprivi, provide significant benefits beyond the purely economic, increasing access to...