Building capacity of local community on Mangrove management in Tuol Torteung commune

Objectives

This project aims to strengthen the capacity of local community on mangrove ecosystem management.

Background

The communities of the commune are highly vulnerable to climate impacts on socio and ecological systems. Due to climate change, sea level rise, shoreline erosion, over-growth of population and over-exploitation of fisheries resources, poverty and land crabbing for private ownership and poor waste management it’s quite a high degree of dependence on fisheries resources, in particular mangrove ecosystem. That’s why it’s a high pressure on the sustainability and effective management of the resources.

Target beneficiaries

In the project design, the project plans to provide direct benefits to 540 people including 270. However, during the project implementation 359 local people from 4 villages including 205 female were identified as the project beneficiaries. 

Outputs

1. Community fisheries in Tuol Torteung commune has increased their capacity on mangrove ecosystem management in sustainable manner
2. Mangrove resources in Toul Torteung commune have been well protected
3. Awareness to local people raised on the understanding and knowledge of benefit of mangrove forests through seeing the conservation signs

Accomplishments and challenges

Accomplishments: 

1. 50 participants including 20 women have attended training workshop on mangrove Ecosystem
2. 50 participants including 20 women attended training workshop and 35 participants have understood about gender, climate change impact and how to build resilience to climate change.
3. 2,700 mangrove seedlings planted, about 50 per cent survived
4. One patrolling team supported by the project
5. 7 large signboards and 200 small signboards of mangrove species installed on the mangrove trees;
6. 310 hand books had prepared and published in June, 2017 for distributing to project target beneficiaries, local authority, competence authorities, government institutions and relevant stakeholders 

Challenges:

 1. It had some difficulties conducting the training course due to the fact that 80 percent of the participants were illiterate. 

Contributions to cross-cutting themes

The project definitely considered creating opportunities for both men and women to gain benefits from the project implementation. Actually, FACT inserted the quota of gender equality since project design and project implementation such as 50% of number of men and women have equality to obtain benefit from the project. Moreover, FACT provided men and women with equal opportunities in workshops, training courses related gender mainstreaming, gender equality concept and encouraged women to become the community committees of the groups that were established under the facilitation by FACT and local authorities and decided by project target beneficiaries group.

Lessons Learned

1. FACT used the simple tools possible such as drawing pictures/images to capture the lesson and to promote understanding of the topics since 80 percent of the participants were illiterate, it was better to encourage local participants in the community to draw pictures than complicated documents. They found the tool/methodology was a very good tool to promote the interaction and full participation in discussion among their community people.
2. The project objective could be achieved and activities implemented as long as there was active participation from local authorities, government officials, local communities and relevant stakeholders.
3. They have learned that the short term project implementation do not get much the extremely positive impact from the project implementation, we recommended that long-term project period should be considered, actually, among the project monitoring process, the local community still need supporting from FACT, they also suggest to set up the long-term project implementation because some main issues cannot be solved in short-term period.