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Participants from across Indonesia travelled to the island of Kaledupa last month to discuss community-led approaches to improving the sustainability of octopus fisheries. This fishers’ forum, hosted by local organisation Forkani, brought fishermen and women, village leaders, representatives of community based organisations and non governmental organisations to the remote Wakatobi archipelago in southeast Sulawesi to ...

The Government of Madagascar has recently designated the Barren Isles archipelago as a wetland area of international importance, in a process supported by WWF Madagascar. This designation, under the international wetlands convention, was celebrated by local government and project partners at the Melaky Economic Fair in Maintirano this month. The convention, otherwise known as the ...

Blue Ventures was honoured to have the opportunity to share insights from our work with His Excellency the President of Madagascar during a roundtable discussion in London. The meeting, hosted at Kew Gardens on 5th September with Thérèse Coffey MP, the UK Under Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), ...

The community of Andavadoaka in southwest Madagascar celebrated over a decade of successful temporary octopus fishery closures on 22 August, by harvesting over half a tonne of octopus in just one day at the latest closure reopening. Early in the morning, fishermen and fisherwomen set off in their laka, traditional fishing boats, towards the island ...

https://vimeo.com/230431952 A new short film released in August 2017 explores the successes and lessons learned from a recent knowledge exchange visit that took fishers from Ataúro in Timor-Leste to Raja Ampat, in Indonesia. We’ve been helping set up a new homestay association on Ataúro where our volunteers spend part of their expedition time. The Raja Ampat Homestay ...

An unprecedented gathering of small-scale fishermen and women from around Madagascar brought together over 170 community representatives in late July in the coastal city of Fort Dauphin.  The five-day meeting was the fourth annual forum of Madagascar’s locally managed marine area (LMMA) network MIHARI, the result of months of preparation by the MIHARI secretariat and ...

In celebration of Safidy's ten year anniversary, a new discover site has been released to illustrate the incredible journey of integrating community health services into our marine conservation work. A decade ago we were a nascent marine conservation group that courageously branched out into working on community health with several respected health partners. Today we’re ...

Three years ago today, a diverse group of health and environmental actors came together and decided to establish… the Madagascar PHE Network! These actors recognised the value of cross-sector collaboration for increasing access to health services and strengthening community-based natural resource management in Madagascar’s biodiversity hotspots, and wanted to create a platform through which they ...

The challenge of achieving contraceptive equity for the most marginalised women and girls is being placed centre-stage at the Family Planning Summit in London this week, as Blue Ventures announces a bold commitment to increase access to family planning services for hard-to-reach communities by scaling up cross-sector partnerships among health and environmental organisations. The Family ...

New research published in the international journal ‘Forests’ reveals for the first time the carbon storage potential of mangroves in the arid region of southwest Madagascar, and also highlights the pressure that these important local resources are under. Focused on the mangroves of Helondrano Fagnemotse (Baie des Assassins) in the Velondriake locally-managed marine area (LMMA), ...