Protected Villages Program

General Objective

To promote actions for local sustainable development to strengthen the different actors of the community, encouraging public and private projects and increasing participation of citizens in decision making, taking into account the need to improve the levels of equity, establishing partnerships, giving affordability, provide technical training in management and biodiversity conservation and management of small and medium business communities involved in tourism, promoting gender equity and cooperate in resource mobilization.

Strategy

• To promote a model of human sustainable development.
• Facilitate tools for the planning, management and monitoring of that development.
• Stimulate the implementation of new methodologies of local government, including stages of better civil participation and creation of new institutions.

Beneficiaries

• Micro, small and midsize enterprises that will be capacitated and sensitized in the use of tools of business management and good environmental and social practices.
• Indigenous and communitarian groups involved in sustainable activities that will improve their administrative management, the sustainability and quality, accessing to micro credits for their businesses.
• Local administrations that will be strengthened, including the incorporation of new models of management by the implementation of local Agendas 21 and practices of co-administration of natural areas.

The elaboration of norms for the sustainable use of touristic places and the elaboration of management plans for the areas of public use of the cultural and natural places will have a great strategic value for the program, because they will allow to have precise rules of use to avoid unwished impacts and saturation that could attempt against the places itself, and against the competitiveness of the destinations.

• Local Agenda 21
• Participatory workshops/ Capacitation
• Valorization of natural and cultural places
• Conservation of the communitarian native forests
• Strengthening of small enterprises
• Implementation of innovative strategies of management of the urban solid waste - Recycling
• Documentation of attributes - historical, social, cultural and environmental

Allies

From the perspective of an NGO for development, it is important to admit the need of cooperation with other organizations. In this case Plan21 Foundation identified the following actors:

• The University for international cooperation of Costa Rica
• Rainfores Alliance of United States
• Conservation and Development of Ecuador
• UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) with your tourism
• Telefónica Foundation
• Australian Embassy
• ICEI International Economic Cooperation Institute of Milan
• FADU - UBA University of Buenos Aires
• PRODA Neuquén

Communities where we work with this program and these lines of action:

• Neuquén:
  • Manzano Amargo (700 inhabitants)
  • Villa del Nahueve (600 inhabitants)
  • Las Ovejas (1300 inhabitants)
  • El Chocon (1200 inhabitants)
  
  
• Corrientes:
  • Carlos Pellegrini (600 inhabitants)