Roles of NGOs in Open Water Fisheries Resources Management in Bangladesh: Experiences of CBFM Project (original) (raw)

This paper examines the roles of non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in improving the status of open water fisheries resources in Bangladesh. NGOs are traditionally involved mostly in micro-credit operations as they are highly experienced and skilled in this area, but they have not been largely involved in natural resources management activities. With the introduction of "Community Based Fisheries Management" (CBFM) project by WorldFish Center in 1995 (Ford Foundation funding), some selected NGOs directly started to work in managing water bodies for fisheries management. The CBFM project aims to harness the partner non-government organizations' (PNGOs) capability to promote more sustainable and equitable community-based management of fisheries. Overall, these partner non-government organizations (PNGOs) worked in 19 sites in the first phase and it improved fishing community empowerment, fisheries management, and equity in distribution of benefits. The second phase of this project was started in September 2001 (Department for International Development-DFID funding), for 5-years and involved 11 PNGOs and The Department of Fisheries (DoF) for implementing its activities in about 115 Water Bodies (WBs) in 19 districts of Bangladesh. Several positive impacts have already been visible. These are, improvement of inland fisheries management, providing livelihoods, employment and Income Generating Activity (IGA) opportunities to over 20,000 poorer fishing households, social mobilization, women empowerment, social awareness raising, and in particular assisting and facilitating access of organized groups of poor fishers to decision making over the water bodies (WBs). However, many challenges are still there in developing the capacity of the PNGOs to sustainably improve the livelihoods of poor people in CBFM project.

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