 Tens of thousands of households in the Irrawaddy Delta region depend on fishing for their livelihoods. And there's one species in particular that is very important. It's extremely commercially valuable. It's called the Hilsha Shad. Hilsha is over-exploited throughout its range. It's overfished in the sea and it's overfished in land. The aim of this project was to demonstrate how incentive-based fisheries management could help to address the dual challenges of biodiversity loss and poverty in Myanmar. It is a partnership between IID, the Myanmar Government Department of Fisheries, the University of Yangon, Welfish and also a local NGO called NAD, the Network Activities Group. All of those partners have been completely crucial to this research. The project focus is to work with small-scale fisheries from the Irrawaddy Delta who are fishing in the freshwater zone. They're trying to solve the problems of overfishing the Yang-Hilsha fish. We spoke to fishing households and asked them about their livelihoods, asked them about their needs and we simply couldn't have done that without a local organisation like NAD who know the media and understand the politics. It's designed to understand their livelihoods along with the biology of their fish and also their ecology system nearby so that we can design the incentive programmes for them to abide the law. What we have proposed is that during these times when fishing is restricted, licensed fishers are compensated for income that is foregone. In 2020, we finalised our set of recommendations for how the incentive scheme could look and we put those together in a white paper for regional and central government. There's a huge export market for Hilsha. The government is very aware of its value commercially but unfortunately because the artisanal fishing sector is so informal it's basically invisible. We were able to go to government and speak their language and make the business case and showed that the economic benefits of an incentive scheme could be up to nine times more than the costs. We spoke to central government about how this financing mechanism could look and our partners World Fish and So travel to the Delta region to speak with regional government parliamentarians and local Department of Fisheries officials. Representatives from local government and from fishing communities have voiced support from many of our suggested reforms and although COVID-19 and recent political events have created uncertainties in Myanmar we're really hopeful that there is enough local ownership for progress to continue.