And in other news, on Wednesday, the Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future awarded over 550,000 dollars' worth of grants to five non-government agencies for the management of eight protected areas across Belize.
The organizations that received the funding were Belize Audubon Society, Sarteneja Alliance for Conservation and Development, Southern Environmental Association, Turneffe Atoll Sustainability Association, and Toledo Institute for Development and Environment.
At the signing ceremony, the chair of the BFSF Board, and the CEO of the Blue Economy Ministry, Kennedy Carillo, explained that they had to speed up their plans to meet the needs of the organizations.
Kennedy Carillo, CEO, Ministry of The Blue Economy
"The BSFS is decided into two parts, one of them is the government's strategic allocations and the other is what we call the grant award program. The government strategic allocations obviously as specifically coordinated through the office of the Blue Bonds which looks at ministries that have. Responsibilities for meeting specific milestones and so that is one process. The second process which is the grant awards program is specifically looking
at more general partners and stakeholders involved in marine conservation or any aspect that the BFSF is responsible for as it relates to the commitments. And so as you learnt today, just four months ago, we were able to start the operationalization of our secretariat, bringing on board our staff, but we were asked by the network of marine protected areas if we would accelerate an emergency support for co-managers that were affected, not only by COVID, but also by Hurricane Lisa, risk of losing staff and also not being able to meet some of the operational expenses, fuel for vessels that do enforcement and so on. And really the board had to make a decision as to whether we would get ahead of the process to be able to provide the support to the marine protected areas co managers, and the decision was made that indeed, if this fund cannot provide this kind of support to these organizations then we would not really be meeting the objective of this fund that is specifically there to provide this support."
The BFSF was established in March of this year as an independent, non-profit fund, which is responsible for managing the funds generated by Belize's Blue Bond debt conversion.
