Kanchana in Netherlands

I found a time to write something about our work in the middle of a training of trainers of wetland Management (TOT) in Wageningen, Netherlands. I came here on the 7th of June and will be getting this training until 27th of this month. This is going to be a very useful training for me as well as for ECO-V as we are currently working on Pelican’s habitats in Sri Lanka. We started on protecting Spot-billed pelican habitats after our work on distribution of Spot-billed Pelicans within Sri Lanka .We realized that their habitats; fresh water man made tanks are in real trouble mainly due to siltation and aquatic alien invasive species. Many fishermen in the freshwater tank habitats are complaining about not taking any actions for this habitat degradation and according to our experience its not that they are not aware of what is happening but they are not stakeholders among the responsible authorities. So ECO-V decided to bridge them and do what ever we can do to protect the pelican habitat for both human and for wildlife. Therefore this TOT will be very useful for our future programmes in getting into new areas that we were not working on.

There are 43 participants from 28 countries. All are mid carrier managers of NGOs and government agencies in their respective countries with more experience in wetland management field. I came here with a help of the fellowship provided by the Netherlands Embassy. There are 39 fellowships given this time out of 300 applicants. So it was a great opportunity to get real experience in wetland management in Netherlands a country which has more wetlands with different level of stakeholder partnerships.