A team of Khovd aimag representatives made a 10 days experience sharing visit to Kyrgyzstan in order to meet representatives of local NGO, CAMP Alatoo, the goal of which is to contribute to the improvement of people's livelihoods in the mountain villages of Kyrgyzstan by encouraging a more sustainable use of natural resources (for details of CAMP, please, refer to www.camp.kg)

For Mongolian representatives the most remarkable subject was the institutional development of herders, their organization process into Pasture Committees/Associations and a solid cooperation with local administration. One of Khovd participants, Leader of Pasture User Association, was keen to know more about the process

of establishment of such committees and had information about the current status of the use of pastureland and key pastureland protection measures that the Committees are undertaking.

Another important subject of discussion was recently approved Law on Pastureland, which, from local herders' point of view, can become a strong tool to regulate use of pastureland and create harmonization between different like-minded institutions.

One of the activities, which seemed challenging for participants was an already established Water User Association, which smoothly operates in coordination with water users and government level institutions. Water in Kyrgyzstan is paid, so the Association is responsible for rehabilitating side channels at farm levels and providing needed services to water users using water fee collected from the users. At the same time Government institution takes care for main irrigation channels, so the coordination between them is set and the farmers hardly face problems with broken channels or shortage of irrigation water. This sort of regulation could be one of the possible ways to solve and organize use of Buyant River (in Khovd aimag).

Participants also noted that the legal environment in both countries, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, is similar, thus the experience sharing process between the visitors and a receiving part was straightforward.

They were introduced to the plantation of esparcet (fodder plant) on the mountains, where cane was growing and which could not be used for any agricultural purpose. Kyrgyz team see esparcet as the main plant to improve soil fertility and it is economically viable to plant esparcet as it is widely used as animal fodder.

Also, participants were introduced a small project on the construction of energy saving stoves, which according to monitoring results, is effective and saves fuel cost. What was interesting in this technology is the preparation of a substance for house insulation using "kefir" (local yogurt). It is believed, kefir is good for compacting sawdust with locally available clay and it gives white color.

Another interesting project, which was relatively new for Mongolians, is the prevention of natural disasters. Kyrgyzstan is seen as prone to different natural disasters, e.g earthquakes, landslide, mud-flows. Special trainers regularly conduct seminars and trainings for local population on how to prevent disaster, how to be prepared and overcome them. Seminars are actively attended by locals and a special training tool "Learning for Sustainability" is utilized in order to ensure lively participation of each participant. This kind of learning tool seemed to the visitors as a motivating and effective instrument to deliver main messages. This approach can be realized also in Khovd, while organizing trainings for the members of Pasture and Water User Groups (in Mongolia a possible natural disaster is a spread of different poisonous species, which harm crop and livestock production).
During the trip participants were more and more certain that the effective use and protection of natural resources in a certain area/region depends much only on local population and no one else.