Gankhuyag balbar
WWF Mongolia Programme Office
Biological Resource Use
Theory of Change for 2010 Rare alumni grant application for Onon River, Mongolia "Set our Taimen Free!" campaign:
We conducted in the Onon River Basin, the Taimen Open Day with the slogan “Set our king Taimen free”, CMA’s festival “Development of CMA”, and Taimen Monitoring and Patrolling Training for increasing of capacity building of local fishermen, CMA people and public general.
Every 2 years, there is an international Buriet (one of the local ethnic groups in Mongolia, also called "bread people") festival called Altargana. This year we celebrated 9th Altargana 2010 international festival in UB. I am one of the initiator of this Altargana festival. Because, we first time founded it was 1994 in Dadal. In the photo I am in the UB statium with Khentii delegates for Altargana 2010. In the other photo I am in the Dadal local Naadam festival.
One activity during taimen open day event is to place outdoor billboards in each soum. Over the last few weeks, WWF soum coordinaters have been building wood frames for the billboards and I have been working with WWF designer to create billboards. My idea was to use pictures of real fishing club members catching and releasing fish in the Onon river, so they are showing behavior change to others. Each soum will have 1-2 billboards that show real fishermen and headline of "brothers, if we catch taimen, let us release them!" In addition, there will be another billboard nearby showing a taimen being released with headline "set our taimen free!" This reinforces messages from brochures and posters too. Thank you to fishermen for their photos and to Mongolia River Outfitters for their taimen release picture.
The new Onon River fishing club members are a very important target audience for the Pride campaign, and big influencer group of other fishermen in the region. They are important because they are the BEST fishermen in all soums - this means they have also been individuals who catch taimen the most, and have not always released them. WWF-Mongolia's goals for these men have been to change their behavior to be catch-and-release fishing only, to conduct fish monitoring when on the river, help patrol for illegal fishing activities, teach other fishermen how to catch-and-release (to change their behavior too), and to one day become fishing guides for local and visiting fishing people. For these reasons, we've invested money in provided these fishing clubs with the right professional gear to be seen as fishing leaders in the community. This gear includes sewn t-shirts, bags to carry cameras and monitoring booklets, pens for conducting monitoring, and fishing jackets.
