Since its inception in March of 2022 The Belize Fund for a Sustainable Future - which comes out of the Blue Bond initiative - continues to provide open calls for funding for advancing marine research, coral restoration, enforcement, and biodiversity protection. They have organized a tour of some of these sites that they have pumped funding into to assist the organizations managing these protected areas. At present they have disbursed funding to 26 of these NGO partners. Today we joined them on a tour of southern waters and their CEO and managing director underscored the importance of their conservation investments made through the Fund's grants and government allocations.
Dr. Leandra Cho-Ricketts, Executive Director, Belize Fund:
"Well a big part of what the Belize fund does is to provide support through, financial support that is, and that is a very critical source of support needed for Belize and what enables us to do that is funding coming out of the Blue bonds so this program is really important for Belize and the work of the fund is crucial as it is a partner with government in ensuring that the monies we have are invested into Belize and into people on the ground and that is a big focus of the fund trying to make sure we find the right partners to connect with he support initiatives and projects that can create meaningful and impactful changes and lasting changes on the ground."
"And today the areas we are looking at are directly related to protection for Biodiversity and focused on marine protected area management so our support is all primarily for those."
Josue Oliva, Program Manager, Belize Fund:
"We ensure that the projects that we get are aligned to one, at least one of our four thematic areas, protection for Biodiversity, sustainable fisheries, climate resilience or Blue business innovation, what we are trying to do now to make it more easier, accessible funding we have also introduced a community grant that allows for emerging organisation such as maybe youth groups such as new organisations coming up grass roots to actually be able to access funding from us as well for interventions cause you can see that a lot of NGO's are able to access funding because of they have the structures in place to actually manage grants but these emerging organisations are also users of our resources and they should also be able to access funding."
NGO's like Mar Alliance, Fragments of Hope and Southern Environmental Association, SEA have benefitted from their partnership with the Belize Fund. We'll have more on this story tomorrow.
