If you would like to see the draft virtual visits which we are developing in conjunction with the radio series Making Ends Meet, please click this link: Making Ends Meet virtual visits.
	Local Communities and the Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary, Ghana A hippo sanctuary has been set up on their land: are the livelihoods of the Lobi of Northern Ghana benefitting? Listen to the Programme		Mila 23, a fishing community in the Danube Delta, Romania The people of the Danube Delta in Romania are finding it hard to accept interference from outside conservationists. Listen to the Programme
	Gosh, an Armenian mountain community The livelihoods of the people of Gosh in the mountains of Armenia are suffering from the collapse from the Soviet system Listen to the Programme		A Community of Buddhist nuns in Upper Myanmar (Burma). The nuns of the Sagaing hills in Burma depend entirely on others for their livelihoods: making merit for their donors through study and prayer. Listen to the Programme

Making Ends Meet is a multi-media project which is a collaboration between the Natural Resources Institute and the BBC. Funding for NRI's participation in the project has been provided by DFID. The project has at its core a series of radio programmes, which were first broadcast on the BBC World Service in August 2002.

Our intention is to explore the lives of people in remote communities around the world, to look at how they make a living and how their lives and livelihoods are related to those of people in the outside world. We've chosen four very different communities in different parts of the world, with different kinds of livelihoods and different kinds of relationship with the outside world: a fishing village in the Danube Delta, Romania; Gosh, a mountain village in Armenia; a community in Northern Ghana which has had a hippo sanctuary set up on their doorstep; and a community of Buddhist nuns in the Sagaing Hills in Upper Myanmar (Burma).

We've tried to bring out issues which are particularly important to the livelihoods of people in these communities, and which have relevance beyond the community chosen. Some of these are:

• How to balance conservation of the natural environment with the livelihoods of human communities, which is important to achieve both environmental and socially sustainable livelihoods
• The importance of interdependance between people in remote communities - what is sometimes called social capital - both within the community and beyond it
• The relative importance of self-reliance on the one hand and of links with the outside world on the other hand, for remote communities like these

We intend to develop educational materials using the Making Ends Meet, including `virtual tours' using panoramas like those displayed here, still images, audio and text. We'd be happy for the material to be used for teaching materials, at the moment through downloading the notes and playing back the audio from the website. Please do let us know if you are doing this - we'd be interested in any feedback.

Monica Janowski