| Geoscience and Environment |
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Aquaculture and Small-Scale Fisheries
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Aquaculture and Small-Scale Fisheries
Recently, the Government of Indonesia implemented an ADB-financed rural infrastructure project that served 1,840 village communities. These communities participated in planning and implementing small-scale projects, many of which generate additional income related to water resource utilization.
My role was to find ways to improve program implementation, in particular by improving utilization of financial resources. During a period of four weeks, I visited approximately 50 project components in 21 remote villages in four eastern provinces, selected because of poverty. My own observations and discussions with local government and community representatives confirm the effectiveness of a participatory approach to small-scale community development. In both design and implementation, the best performing communities appear to be those that have opted for income-generating project components, mainly small-scale irrigation improvements. In several locations, I observed what appeared to be underutilization of opportunities for aquaculture, a component not included in the project, but amenable to the participatory approach. These observations are what interests me in researching ways to reduce poverty by increasing the contributions of small-scale fisheries and aquaculture to improved incomes, food and nutrition. The challenge is to identify sites where aquaculture and/or small-scale fisheries would thrive and to identify communities that would mobilize to develop the sites through a participatory approach, whereby government facilitates development, but the community does the planning and implementation using its own labor. Facilitation usually means provision of support personnel and small grants for materials and rental of heavy equipment. Small-scale developments throughout a region or province are then aggregated to obtain the economies of scale needed to justify national programming efforts. The URL of this site is [http://www.geoscience-environment] |