Working Holistically

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.

"When Barry Segal first visited Rwanda back in 2007, he observed that many organizations were working to solve similar problems with little collaboration. He believed he could make an impact simply by investing in great organizations and by bringing them together. Here is a great example of how this looks when it works." Nicholas Reed-Krase, ...

Incorporating family planning services within community conservation initiatives can address the unmet reproductive health needs of hard-to-reach populations, enabling couples to access contraception and avoid unintended pregnancies. This is the finding of a paper just published in Studies in Family Planning, which reports on changes in modern contraception use and general fertility rates between 2009 ...

Alasdair Harris founded Blue Ventures whilst attending Mansfield College at the University of Oxford, and it has since evolved into a substantial marine conservation organisation with a growing portfolio of field programmes in several different countries. An interview published by Oxford Today details how Alasdair Harris' interest in marine biodiversity and research led to Blue ...

Over the past year, three of our senior staff in Madagascar have been working with the Earth Skills Network to reflect on, and improve, the management of our conservation programmes. Read the full post: A year of self critique and tough decisions