Tuesday 15 May 2007

Update from Oslo




Typical GP act! and misplaced the camera at the conference dinner! Hmm..Hope I will get it back. Had all the photographs from Sunderbans as well as whatever I took since arriving in Oslo three days before in it!.

The conference went well yesterday. Inaugural session in the presence of the Queen of Norway was well attended by almost 400 delegates from 76 countries. Was looking forward to upload some pictures from the workshops and exhibitions for regular readers. But until the hunt for the camera is over, I guess we have to wait :)

One of the striking images at the workshop on Local partnerships for Community-Based Eco Tourism was Amos, who came dressed in his traditional attire and captivated the crowd about how they run their base camp in Masai Mara based on local-global partnerships. Svein Whilhemsen, a venture capitalist is now promoting similar business in Svalbard, Rajasthan, Dharamsala, Lamu and Solovki.

In his presentation Svein was upfront when he said, those who are looking for investments in similar projects should have immense patience and passion to sustain the slow-low returns as the trend in the industry right now is about 80% failure on community based projects! They took more than five years to break-even.

Quite an inspiring model to look at.

Oslo © GP 2007

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

happy hunting!!!
if not the royal bengal ustad atleast a digital!!!!