Our standard expeditions last 6 weeks to ensure continuity of research and community relations, but we also receive volunteers for longer or shorter periods. A 6-week expedition costs £1,900 for a volunteer with PADI Advanced Open Water certification (or equivalent) and £2,100 for a volunteer with no previous dive training. Our website has full details of expedition costs and dates. Our volunteers are of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds. No previous experience is necessary to join us as we provide full scientific and dive training on site.

In terms of input from the local villagers, community groups work closely with us to develop conservation and management plans. We work to empower local communities to manage their own resources.

Blue Ventures is currently partnering with dozens of remote fishing villages along Madagascar’s southwest coast to create the largest community-run protected area in the entire Western Indian Ocean. The reserve, named Velondriake (“to live with the sea”) by the villagers, spans 800-square km, benefits more than 10,000 people and protects coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds, baobab forests and other threatened habitats.
Local villagers worked with Blue Ventures to define the boarders of Velondriake and identify which habitats to protect. They are now being trained in conservation science and planning, and have themselves established a management board that will oversee the implementation, management and monitoring of the reserve.

As part of our commitment to local training and capacity building, we offer 10 fully-funded conservation scholarships and 20 scuba scholarships per year to Malagasy nationals. Recent scuba qualifications have included the first ever PADI professional certification for a Malagasy diver.
Over half our staff on site are Malagasy nationals, many of which come from local villages.

In 2007 the village of Andavadoaka’s partnership with Blue Ventures won the United Nation’s Development Programme’ Equator Prize in recognition of outstanding community efforts for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation.

If you would like to know more please email madagascar@blueventures.org.

While Blue Ventures is a not-for-profit organisation, we use a business model that allows us to not only remain financially viable but also to grow financially over the years.

The vast majority of our money used for conservation work comes directly from our volunteer expeditions. We have relied very little on outside donations (We're happy to accept them, but we do not depend upon them to keep us going!)

We market and promote our volunteer expeditions as any business would promote their product. The difference, however, is that all profits from the volunteer expeditions go directly back into conservation activities. Blue Ventures is actually two entities -- the charity Blue Ventures Conservation and the not-for-profit Blue Ventures Expeditions. Again, all profits from our Expeditions not-for-profit is handed over to the Conservation charity.

We first launched our volunteer expeditions and affiliated conservation activities in Madagascar in 2003. Since then, the number of paying volunteers joining our expeditions has grown steadily, allowing us to expand our conservation projects accordingly.

In 2003, we started with just a few dozen volunteers and launched our first conservation project by creating a 200 hectre community-run no-take zone for octopus in a single village in Madagascar. A combination of the success of the no-take zone (village fishers report a huge increase in octopus catch when the no-take zone is opened each season) along with a steady increase in the number of paying volunteers joining our expedtions (we now host more than 100 volunteers and independent researchers each year in Madagascar)has allowed us to now launch a massive network of protected areas that will span 800-square kilometres, include 25 villages and benefit 10,000 people. The project is one of the largest community-run protected areas in the Western Indian Ocean. We could not have done this without the funding and manpower provided by our expedition volunteers.

Blue Ventures plans, implements and monitors our own conservation projects. We bring volunteers to our own project sites to work with our scientists and partners to protect marine areas. Earthwatch, as I understand, matches volunteers to projects conducted by other organisations.

While our work is currently focused on protecting the marine resources in Madagascar, we share our data and conservation knowledge with a variety of organisations around the world in the hope of improving global marine systems.

Blue Ventures is part of the International Year of the Reef 2008, working to increase awareness about the importance of coral ecosystems and to promote the conservation of these vital resources.

Our scientists regularly present reports and case studies to conservation conferences and workshops around the world. All of our scientific reports also are posted on our website for others conservationists to make use of and learn from.

We are also currently building an on-line interactive marine species identification database for the Western Indian Ocean. Blue Ventures will include photos and biological information of all species we have recorded in the region. The database will also allow others to post information on species they have recorded in the Western Indian Ocean. The aim is to make a comprehensive reference database that is freely available to students and professional taxonomists alike. Such a database will be extremely valuable to conservation activities in the region.

More broadly, all of Blue Ventures' geotourism efforts are aimed at protecting marine resources for the betterment of both people and nature. We believe tourism can be a powerful conservation tool. Our volunteer expeditions not only raise money for conservation, but also provide the manpower needed to gather scientific data and implement conservation strategies.

We also believe that conservation cannot be conducted in a vacuum. It must incorporate the needs of local communities and provide benefits to those same communities. Otherwise any conservation efforts are doomed to failure.

Blue Ventures has been invited by the Madagascar National Park Service (ANGAP) to create a marine park in Manahy, a region north of our current project site along the southwest coast. Manahy is home to the Kirindy National Park. That park, however, does not have a marine conservation area. Blue Ventures is working with ANGAP to add a marine conservation area to the park. We will launch a new expedition programme in the area where volunteers will conduct scientific reseach and collect data on marine species that will be used to develop conservation plans for the park area. The region's coral reefs are unexplored, so the data collected by volunteers and Blue Ventures scientists will be critical in developing conservation planning.

Blue Ventures is also talking with several NGOs, universities and others about a possible volunteer project to protect threatened marine systems in Fiji.

Regarding sustainable livelihoods in Madagascar, Blue Ventures has launched sea cucumber farming projects in three Malagasy villages. Sea cucumbers are a multi-billion dollar industry in Asia, sold as culinary delicacies and herbal medicine. Because of their high market value, sea cucumbers are being over-fished. They once were plentiful in shallow, near-shore waters across Madagascar, but many villagers are now resorting to using old SCUBA gear to locate deepsea specimens. Diving not only threatens the sustainability of sea cucumber populations, but is extremely dangerous and has resulted in numerous deaths. Blue Ventures has built sea cucumber pens in shallow waters and has trained local women to raise lab-provided sea cucumber juveniles. Blue Ventures helped secure a contract with a local fishing company and all profits from the sea cucumber sales go directly to the village women.

Blue Ventures has also trained more than a dozen locals are eco-tour guides and is building a carbon-neutral eco-lodge in the area. Eco-tourism will provide sustainable incomes as well as financial incentives to keep local habitats healthy and beautiful to attract tourists.