Funding Proposal Submitted to the Rotary International Foundation

Enepalese Published on: March 13, 2019

Funding Proposal Submitted to the Rotary International Foundation

Nepal’s Great Himalaya Trail:

Conservation, Development

, and Income Generation

Malcolm J. Odell, Jr. and Brian Peniston

The Snow Leopard Conservancy

Washington, DC

11 March 2019

The outcomes:

 

The anticipated outcome of Nepal’s Great Himalaya Trail (GHT) initiative is a vibrant network of communities engaged in grass-roots ecotourism that is promoting conservation and development along this iconic 500-mile track. Over the next 2 years, the project will train, educate, and actively engage a total of 1000 to

2500

local people from 60-80 culturally diverse villages, each with a population of 200-500 people. The initiative will ultimately impact the lives of 40-60,000 people living along an extraordinary trekking route that traverses the entire country from east to west. Five trained local teams will facilitate community mobilization to generate local ownership and protection of the natural resource base through

development of an eco-tourism industry that will substantially increase incomes among some of the poorest, yet proudest, people in the world.

 

 The setting:

The Great Himalaya Trail traverses the south side of Nepal’s mountains and the Tibetan border, snaking over 500 miles, across rugged, but spectacularly beautiful terrain of high mountains, lush alpine valleys, cloud forests, glaciers, high altitude deserts, and some of the world’s deepest gorges. The landscape is home to 8 of the 10 highest peaks in the world, and is populated by picturesque mountain villages rich with sacred and cultural landscapes such as 1000-year-old Buddhist monasteries, revered fertility sites, and numerous cultural features that include meditation caves, replete with stories, myth and legends. These lands are also home to incredible biological diversity and provide habitat for the endangered and threatened snow leopard, blue sheep, Himalayan thar, and bird species such as Himalayan griffon and bearded vultures, all of which are threatened by climate change. There are some 200 separate hamlets spread across this landscape, home to as many as 900,000 people who will be the indirect beneficiaries of this initiative. Together they represent about 25 different ethnic groups, with different languages, cultures, and traditions. (Nepal 2011 Census)

 

The Nepal Government and Nepal’s thriving tourism industry have recognized these unique global assets and have been promoting the Great Himalaya Trail over the last decade in an attempt to introduce these treasures to the world, while preserving the region’s unique natural and cultural assets. Unfortunately these laudable efforts have fallen short, as demonstrated today by the paucity of local tourism facilities and small numbers of visitors, severely limiting the GHT’s financial benefits to local people.

The challenge:

While rich in cultural and natural diversity, many of these villages remain desperately poor and underserved by Government services or facilities. They are far from the nearest road head, often accessible only by several days’ walk over precipitous paths and makeshift bridges. Most of the inhabitants of these “off the beaten track” villages live a subsistence lifestyle, surviving on a combination of low technology agriculture, mixed agro-pastoralism, and limited domestic livestock-rearing, supplemented by the collection of wild natural products and seasonal out-migration to generate remittances. Villagers often live a hand-to-mouth existence and have few reserves in case of disaster or emergency. Many villagers are livestock-dependent and can little afford any losses of domestic livestock to natural predators.

 

Except in the Mount Everest and Annapurna regions, most villages see few visitors, and even fewer directly benefit from Nepal’s ecotourism industry. When visitors do come, they often visit as part of self-sufficient trekking groups, whose leaders are from outside the area, with most of the financial benefits accruing to these entrepreneurs and business owners. Rarely do these tour operators share profits with local hosts.

 

The opportunity:

By targeting activities on both environmental conservation and local enterprise and employment generation, the GHT initiative provides an opportunity to strengthen the resilience of these isolated villagers, who routinely face natural disasters, livestock depredation, and other unforeseen economic consequences. Building on natural and cultural assets such as the presence of snow leopards and other natural and cultural attractions, these villages can generate income and promote behaviors that conserve endangered species and other natural assets.

 

The process:

Nepal has an internationally recognized half-century-history of using participatory community engagement and asset-based planning tools to regenerate forests and, since 1996, to protect national parks and wildlife and solve local problems. This project proposes to build on these time-tested participatory techniques, using a proven community mobilization method developed in Nepal and known as APPA: Appreciate Planning and Participatory Action. This APPA methodology has been successfully employed in Nepal since the late 1990s. It has helped generate sustainable national park management, women’s empowerment, and community banking programs that have served 6000 villages and women’s groups since 1997, many of which are still active today.

These engagement techniques emphasize participatory identification of local skills, assets, and priorities, based on communities’ past experience. This simple, but radical and innovative approach allows local people to identify the activities that are most likely to succeed, based on their experience, and sparks thinking about what has been working in the community, rather than focusing on the problems the community faces. Training will focus on helping villagers identify community assets that can be mobilized to address very real challenges in their remote mountain villages – for example, depredation of local livestock by snow leopards and other predators such as Himalayan wolves, which are returning in large numbers across the landscape.

To minimize project costs while maximizing broad benefits, local learning, and sustainability, the project team will use APPA to conduct a series of participatory enterprise identification and planning exercises in 5 separate clusters of villages distributed across the GHT.  The project team will consist of two project managers, Malcolm Odell and Brian Peniston, described below, who will work closely with local Nepal NGO partners, both women, and men, who are familiar with the APPA process. Malcolm and Brian will develop enterprise identification tools and training workshops, using a training-of-trainers approach that will include conservation, wildlife protection, community development, eco-tourism, and other local income-generation activities. To maximize learning and to minimize costs, the initial training will be held at a central village in the first cluster and will include participants from nearby villages, highlighting the synergies and collective learning across the area’s village clusters.

Following the initial training session in the first of 5 clusters, the local NGO partners will fan out to conduct APPA training sessions in a central village in each of the remaining 4 clusters. This training will be repeated in 12-15 villages, engaging 20-30 people in each village to reach between 200-500 villagers per cluster, for a total of 1000 to 2500 trained local people. These training sessions will be repeated in approximately 60-80 separate villages, reaching an estimated population of approximately 40-60,000 people—a significant proportion of the 900,000 people living in Nepal’s “Mountain Eco-Development” region.

 

The APPA process has proved successful in energizing villagers in the Makalu, Kanchenjunga, middle hills, and Terai regions to reach out to those in other villages. This experience suggests that additional communities will join the GHT initiative and share in its income-generation benefits over time. This will lead to an overall increased commitment to and local ‘ownership’ of conservation and development by those in communities on and near the GHT. The resulting indigenous eco-tourism industry will significantly enhance local incomes as well as protect rich cultural and religious traditions. Over the long run, this can become a high-profile model that showcases the community mobilization approach. This Great Himalaya Trail initiative can thus have profound implications for other conservation, development, and income-generation activities across Nepal and beyond, in a world where climate change is threatening the natural environment and endangered species.

 

 

 

 

The request:

$118,770

  • To fund:

1) International staff time

2 persons @ US$400/day x 3 months @ 22 days per month                         $52,800

2) International staff air travel & expenses

2 round trips @ $2000 per trip x 2 persons over 24 months                             $8,000

Visas, travel insurance, vaccinations, transfers, etc.                                          $2,210

3) International staff local field travel and per diem

KTM per diem @ $90/person /day for 2 persons for 14 days                            $2,520

Field travel & food and incidentals

48 days x 2 persons @ $65/person/per day                                                      $6,240

4) Local staff contracts x 4 persons x 3 months @ $2500/month                          $30,000

5) Local staff travel, lodging, and per diem, 4 staff @90 days x $30/day              $10,800

6) Local travel for Nepali staff, workshop hall retail, supplies, etc.                          $6,200

TOTAL REQUEST                                                                                                                $118,770

The principals:

  • Malcolm Odell, a Peace Corps volunteer in the first group to go to Nepal in 1962, has lived and worked in Nepal for 13 years. His career includes working for over 35 years in international community mobilization, women’s empowerment, strategic planning, evaluation/monitoring, conflict resolution, eco-tourism, climate change, training, and project management. He is known globally for the creation of innovative organization development and mobilization strategy, “Appreciative Planning and Action” (APA), known in Nepal as APPA and used successfully in peace-building following the Maoist Rebellion. Malcolm has used APA with the numerous US and international firms and organizations, including a dozen Habitat for Humanity affiliates, 250 local NGOs, and almost 400,000 poor men and women in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and several other countries. During the 19 years he has lived and worked abroad, he has spent 9 years in villages of Asia and Africa, including 5 years working for the Government of Botswana in Southern Africa. Malcolm has worked with the World Bank, USAID, NORAD, IFAD, CARE, NIH, IRC, Pact, Japan International Cooperation Agency, The Heifer Project, and other organizations. He has a BA from Princeton and MS and Ph.D. degrees in applied development sociology from Cornell University.

 

  • Brian Penistonhas more than 35 years’ experience planning, managing and evaluating international natural resource, conservation and development programs in 14 countries, including over 25 years’ experience in Nepal, where he also served as a Peace Corps volunteer. He has particular expertise in protected area management, biodiversity conservation, natural resource management, climate change adaptation and resilience, integrated national park management, and livelihoods improvement and enterprise development. Currently active with the Snow Leopard Conservancy, Brian was co-manager for the development of Nepal’s Makalu Barun National Park and served as Director of Himalayan Programs for The Mountain Institute, with activities that took him to Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Sikkim/Arunachal Pradesh in India. Recent projects include working to assess the Government of Nepal’s preparedness for REDD carbon emission reduction and carbon sequestration projects. He has also served as Team Leader to assess the impacts of Nepal’s new government structures on conservation and natural resource management projects. He is skilled in using participatory rural appraisal, Appreciative Inquiry, and APPA as the basis for both project management and building community-based projects. He has an undergraduate degree from Connecticut College and Master’s degrees from the University of Hawaii (MPH) and Yale University’s School of Forestry (Master of Forestry).