Latest News

Blue Ventures has released a new Explore Photo Story to coincide with World Fisheries Day. This photo story follows Avy, a fisherman from the remote coastal village of Andavadoaka in southwest Madagascar. His family are Vezo, the traditional fishers of the area, distinguished by their intimate knowledge of, and reliance on, the sea. Climb aboard a ...

The Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC) in partnership with Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project and Population Reference Bureau (PRB) hosted a two-day regional Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Symposium in Entebbe, Uganda, on the 27th-28th of September. This event brought together over 90 PHE implementers, policy makers, development partners, and community representatives to discuss the main theme of ...

Sharing best practices in locally-led conservation is an essential component of empowering communities in marine protection. A new toolkit produced by Blue Ventures for Madagascar’s locally managed marine area network MIHARI provides practical guidance for communities setting up local marine conservation initiatives. Locally managed marine areas (LMMAs) are marine and coastal areas managed by local ...

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 ...