1.1 Million Dollars for Conservation Projects in Belize  

The Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future is pouring over a million dollars into conservation projects across Belize. This fund provides long-term support for initiatives that protect our marine life and biodiversity. Today, News Five’s Britney Gordon was in San Ignacio to meet the eight lucky recipients of this award. Here’s the story.

 

Britney Gordon, Reporting

Today, more than one million dollars was spread across eight conservation projects in Belize, thanks to the generous support of the Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future. This fund is all about creating transparent and inclusive financing to boost Belize’s marine and coastal resources. Leandra Cho-Ricketts, the Executive Director, shared how these grants align with the fund’s vision for a vibrant and resilient blue economy in Belize.

 

Leandra Cho-Ricketts, Executive Director, Belize Fund

“This is our third  award ceremony and every year we have a call for proposals. And after the end of that call, we award grants, right? So this year we awarded eight grants. Four were regular grants as we call them, which are range from small through medium, large. So that’s between fifty thousand up to eight hundred thousand. And then we had a new category this year. So for the first time we’re offered community grants. So these are smaller, these are up to seventy-five thousand. We awarded four, and as the name suggests, they were awarded to all community based entities.”

 

The Belize Fund channels its Blue Bond Funding through two key programs. The Government Strategic Allocation (GSA) is backing the government with over five million to bolster Belize’s conservation efforts. Meanwhile, the Grant Awards Program (GAP) offers funding to non-government partners who share the Belize Fund’s mission. The Director of Blue Economy in the Ministry of Blue Economy and Disaster Risk Management emphasized the ministry’s dedication to using these resources to hit the fund’s conservation milestones.

 

Felicia Cruz, Director, Ministry of Blue Economy & Disaster Risk Management

“Partnerships are very much important to us and. At the ministerial level, we know that we can do so much more together than a loan. And that really is the ambition for blue economic development in Belize. Strategic alliances that will help our society and our communities prosper. That will help the environment to ensure its viability and its health. It’s safeguarded and of course to ensure that our communities benefit economically from these initiatives, which we’re very much proud of today.”

 

There are four thematic areas prioritized by the Belize Fund: protection for biodiversity, sustainable fisheries, climate resilience and blue business innovation. Hector Martinez received a seventy-five thousand dollar grant on behalf of the Shark Fishers Association. These funds will be used to ensure compliance with international Shark fishing standards and data collection.

 

Hector Martinez, Grant Recipient

“We set  cameras at different locations on the reef three. Three sites on the main reef and three three als. And we are gonna compare that video footage to previous footage collected over the past years. And like I said, the idea is to monitor the abundance of sharks. And we also work strictly with the shark fishers who actually fish sharks, like not lobster fishers, conch fishers, but actually shark fishers. And the benefit of that is that days that we are doing research is days that they’re not fishing sharks. Whether nothing else works, we are reducing the shark fishing pressure.”

 

Cho-Ricketts highlights that the Belize Fund guarantees transparency by meticulously following up on every project.

 

Leandra Cho-Ricketts

“We have  a very excellent team that’s tracking project performance. We have a whole monitoring and evaluation system and a team that does that touches base with grantees and tracks their progress. But in the case of the community grants, we provide the fiduciary management, so we don’t actually give them the money. We will disperse or not disperse, procure services that they need to allow them to do the work.”

 

Jeavon Blancaneaux from Creative Imageries Motion Art Studio was awarded a generous grant of seventy-four thousand, nine hundred and sixty dollars to empower women and youth through animation. Blancaneaux is excited to create an animated film that showcases Belize’s vibrant marine life.

 

Jeavon Blancaneaux, Grant Recipient

“It will bring the orange economy, we’re talking about the creative sector, bring it to the forefront employing young people, employing women. But we also hope to create awareness through this means in a creative way. So we want to teach about the marine world. We want to teach about protecting the marine world, but we also want it to be in a creative, enter entertaining way so that our Belizean people can actually appreciate what we have in our marine space.”

 

Other projects funded include lagoon protection, plastic sustainability and Barrier Reef conservation programs.

 

Leandra Cho-Ricketts

“For the community grants they needed to just meet one of the four. But  we were looking for projects that particularly involved fishers, so we gravitated toward fisher proposals. We wanted to ensure we could engage youth. So of course we were looking for projects like that, but projects that really looked at bringing hands-on capacities and empowering those community groups to do actions on the ground themselves.”

 

Britney Gordon for News Five.