Owan Lake and its beautiful surrounding environment is a major tourism site, however, it is now in danger of misuse of the resources and strains from the tourism flux among other threats such as lack of local custodianship, insufficient inter-departmental coordination, poverty, unemployment, immigration, etc. The overall goal of the full grant project is to create and implement a local co-management for the protection and sustainable use of the Owan Lake which will also ameliorate the issues of the local community of the region. The project will undertake the establishment and empowerment of a local Eco-tourism Cooperative which will implement this plan to provide services to the general public and protect the lake and the surrounding fragile environment from obliteration. It will also conduct training workshops on income generating activities such as medicinal herbs and capacity building for the locals to implementing small scale projects. The group also seeks to foster dialogue among various stakeholders.
The grantee is using a planning grant to extract the baseline in order to complete the design of the project. The baseline will be extracted through Participatory Action Research and Participatory Rural Appraisal techniques by experts in these fields:
1.Identify and gain more knowledge about the target audience
2.Conduct a needs assessment and a feasibility study for establishing and empowering a Local Eco-tourism Cooperative.
3.Design the details of the project with involvement and participation of the local community.
4.Identify the interested stakeholders willing to co-fund the project and the possible type and amount of co-funding