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Madagascar’s Minister of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, HE Augustin Andriamananoro, recently hosted three landmark workshops in Morondava, Ambanja and Antananarivo, to discuss the future of the island’s lucrative mangrove mud crab fishery. The three events brought together over 200 attendees from across the fishery supply chain, from fishers to exporters, researchers and government representatives. Having ...

For over a decade, Blue Ventures has been supporting communities across the Western Indian Ocean to organise temporary octopus fishery closures as a pathway to longer term management. The closures serve to give the octopus time to increase in size and reproduce. This management method is successful because the life cycle of octopus is short ...

Blue Ventures is working with the Government of Madagascar to help coastal communities create a locally-managed marine area (LMMA) around the Barren Isles, which will become the country’s largest marine protected area, as well as the Indian Ocean’s largest LMMA. This ambitious conservation initiative aims to safeguard the marine biodiversity underpinning the archipelago’s traditional fisheries by ...

World Mangrove Day is celebrated globally on 26 July, but for Blue Ventures' blue forests team in Ambanja, northwest Madagascar, celebrations were delayed until Saturday 28. This was to coincide with the signing of natural resource management rights contracts by ten local communities and the Ministry of Environment, Ecology and Forests (MEEF), a critical moment that ...

The implementation of an exclusive fishing zone for Madagascar’s small-scale fishers was the subject of a meeting between the Minister of Fisheries and staff from the MIHARI Network and Blue Ventures. The landmark meeting at the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources in Antananarivo on 19th July 2018 began with a speech from Mr Hermany ...

Since October 2016, Blue Ventures has partnered with FORKANI – an Indonesian community-based organisation working in the Wakatobi archipelago to secure community management rights of local marine resources. Over the last 15 months, FORKANI has been facilitating community-based monitoring and management efforts of the octopus fishery in Darawa village, engaging with fishers, village government, traditional ...

Learning exchange programmes have proven a highly effective way of engaging fishing communities and partner organisations in peer-to-peer learning, to energise and inspire those wishing to share knowledge and expertise in fisheries management and marine conservation. In April 2018 seven representatives from northern Kenya, from TNC Kenya, the Northern Rangelands Trust and the Pate Marine ...

Between 2003 and 2016, Madagascar’s protected area coverage quadrupled. Such unprecedented growth brought great hope, some notable successes and a host of new challenges for the island’s conservation community. Co-authored by Charlie Gardner from the University of Kent and other practitioners involved in the evolution of the island’s protected area system, including Blue Ventures’ Executive ...

Twenty health and environmental organisations in Madagascar – including Blue Ventures – have signed the world’s very first PHE quality charter, signalling their commitment to rights-based PHE partnerships designed to improve the health of people and the environment. Madagascar’s PHE movement has been growing rapidly since the creation of a national PHE network in July ...

A symposium event was held on the 8th and 9th of May to officially close the Roger Samba and J. Paul Getty Scholarship Programme. Mr. Roger Samba won the Paul Getty Award for his Leadership in Conservation in 2008 while he was the president of the isolated village of Andavadoaka in southwest Madagascar. Mr. Samba ...