Restoring tropical fisheries
- EUMCS Committee
- Feb 17, 2021
- 3 min read
Our annual charity raffle is approaching! This year, in collaboration with SurfSoc and Conscious Change, we will be collecting money for, drumroll please...
Have you heard of this awesome organisation yet? No? Than this blogpost is for you! Choosing a cause was hard this year - there are just so many great ones out there - but we hope you will love the winner as much as we do!
Who? Blue Ventures are a social enterprise that concentrates on marine conservation. . If you don’t know what a social enterprise is, check out this great explanation on Investopedia.
What? The organisation is working on replenishing small scale fisheries, coastal conservation and community wellbeing.
Where? They started off in Madagascar and now are spreading to other places in the Indian Ocean.
What’s special? All conservation efforts are done in tight co-operation with local communities who then take over and manage the projects. Blue Ventures are pioneering a holistic strategy that puts community wellbeing at the heart of coastal conservation, a robust sustainable solution to overfishing in those areas. Since their foundation in 2003 they have received almost 30 different awards, the latest being the inaugural Food Planet Prize in recognition of their commitment to addressing food insecurity in 2020.
From octopi to family planning
The organisation formed after a 2003 coral reef research trip to Madagascar. Local Veso communities were concerned about declining fish stock, and so one village agreed to an experimental temporary enclosure of a small part of it’s fishing grounds. When re-opened after a few months, the area was full of octopi, important part of the villagers diets. The success started off a chain of similar projects along the entire coast of Madagascar. Today there are over 70 locally managed marine areas (called LMMAs) around the island. The organisation prides itself on designing scallable strategies that can be adopted all over the world and plan on extending their work around the Western Indian Ocean and Sout-East Asia.
The key to Blue Ventures’ success is empowering communities to learn and practice sustainable aquaculture on their own and to listen to the community feedback and needs.
According to the organisation, over half a billion people worldwide depend on small scale fisheries for their food and income. It’s these people, whose very cultural identity and livelihoods are intertwined with the ocean, who suffer the most from environmental degradation, overfishing and climate change. Conservation projects often condemn themselves to failiure by not making locals an integral part of their programme and ignoring the value of their contribution.
But teaching locals sustainable aquaculture is only a half of what Blue Ventures is about. The villagers, especially women with whom the organisation was working, talked about having too many children, and a hard time taking care of them as a result (Blue Ventures states that at that time child mortality was cca 20% and the average number of children per women was around 7). These fishing communities are very remote and so family planning or healthcare services were not easily available to them.
The communities expressed a clear need and so in 2007 Blue Ventures launched their first family planning centre. You can listen to the full story in this great TEDx talk by one of the founders, Vik Mohan.
On their website they say:
“We started incorporating reproductive health into our fisheries management initiatives with partner health organisations in 2007. Since then, we have expanded this programme to serve over 45,000 people across more than 75 communities along Madagascar’s west coast.”
Their work has proved very effective. Use of modern contraceptives has skyrocketed and number of children per woman halved. Women are better able to take care of their family, they have more time and energy and so can take up jobs, save for the future and take part in community decision making.
Women now constitute 38% of the Velondriake LMMA’s (locally managed marine area) general assembly compared to just 13% at the start of the project. That is higher than in many European countries' parliaments.
Gender equality, health and sustainable aquaculture all go hand in hand in creating a more resilient communities and more resilient ecosystems. Empowered and healthy people can take better care of their environment and smaller families put less pressure on the fisheries.
„We recognise the inextricable links between environmental degradation, food insecurity, lack of alternative livelihoods, poor health, unmet family planning needs, limited education, inadequate human rights and vulnerability to climate change.”
If you want to see more of Blue Ventures' work, check out this award winning short documentary film Kokoly!
If you wonder about funding, you can download annual reports here on their websites.
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