Working Holistically

Our Medical Director reflects on ten years of integrating community health services into local marine management efforts in Madagascar. Read the full post: Ten years of providing communities with the freedom to choose

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 ...

DW recently published a piece about the impacts of declining fish stocks and climate change on coastal communities in Madagascar, and the alternative livelihoods that these communities are turning to as fishing becomes unsustainable. In Tampolove, a small village in the south of Madagascar, where people's diet consists mainly of fish and rice, fishers have started farming ...

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 ...

As family planning actors across the world race to increase service uptake against a backdrop of unprecedented funding cuts, providers are being forced to deliver more with less, often prioritising easily accessible urban populations. Yet resourceful mechanisms do exist for reaching isolated and under-served communities. This thought-provoking article by Blue Ventures' Health-Environment Partnerships Manager, Laura Robson, published by the Thomson ...

In Lisa Palmer's book Hot Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change, published in May 2017, she writes at length about the integrated Population-Health-Environment (PHE) approach, and its capacity to help communities manage their natural resources and their health. Blue Ventures has been integrating the PHE approach ...

Our Medical Director Dr Vik Mohan recently spoke at TEDxExeter 2017 about Blue Ventures' holistic approach to conservation, which developed through listening to the coastal communities we work with in Madagascar. Women told us how they were desperate for better access to family planning services. Men were keen to use family planning too. Dwindling fisheries could no ...

FHI 360 has listed Blue Ventures' PHE approach and results as an example of promising and important integrated development in their Research & Evaluation blog. Blue Ventures was founded as a marine conservation program. Yet after listening to several of the coastal communities they work with in Madagascar, they came to understand the key linkages people perceived between ...

In response to requests for technical support from environmental organisations collaborating with health service providers in isolated and biodiverse areas across Madagascar, we’re delighted to share this comprehensive Population-Health-Environment (PHE) partnerships guide and integrated PHE community outreach tool. Read the full story on the Madagascar PHE Network's website. Download the resources here.