Lake Victoria

The World Wildlife Fund's Professional Development Grants (PDGs) provide support for mid-career conservationists to pursue short-term, non-degree training to upgrade their knowledge and skills. These trainings can include short courses, certificate trainings or conferences among other training opportunities.

Conservation Workshop Grants fund organizations to train communities, stakeholders, park guards, and others on local and regional conservation issues. These grants support training workshops with a strong hands-on learning component that will build capacity for people living in WWF priority regions in select countries. Please note that within eligible countries, preference is given to applicants working in WWF priority regions.

The Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) is a UK registered charity offering ongoing support to outstanding nature conservationists around the developing world. They aim to:

Population, Health, and the Environment (PHE) is a community-based development model that uses integrated approaches to improve access to health services, especially family planning and reproductive health, while helping communities manage natural resources and conserve the critical ecosystems on which they depend. PHE is a last mile approach that reaches vulnerable populations in rural areas that are typically beyond the reach of government services and large-scale development projects. For over two decades, diverse organizations around the world have carried out PHE projects.

Poor people depend on the environment for their livelihoods and well-being. Improved management of the environment and natural resources contributes directly to poverty reduction, more sustainable livelihoods and pro-poor growth. To fight poverty, promote security and preserve the ecosystems that poor people rely on for their livelihoods, pro-poor economic growth and environmental sustainability must be integrated into economic policies, planning systems and institutions.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP) provides financial and technical support to projects that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people's well-being and livelihoods.The programme is rooted in the belief that global environmental problems can best be addressed if local people are involved and there are direct community benefits and ownership.

The principle objectives of SGP are to:

Wetlands are important for the role they play in society providing a range of ecological and socio-economic functions. Ecological and regulating services include erosion prevention, moderation of extremes, sediment traps, climate modification, soil formation, maintenance of water tables in surrounding lands and as centres of biodiversity and wildlife habitat. Socio-economic or provisioning services include food, medicines, water supply, fisheries, dry-season grazing for livestock, nutrient and toxin retention, tourism and so on.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) initiated the development of National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) at its 7th Conference of the Parties (COP 7) in Marrakech, Morocco. The NAPA provide a quick process for identifying priority activities that respond to an urgent and immediate needs to adapt to climate change those for which further delay would increase vulnerability and/or costs at a later stage.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the Critically Endangered Animals Conservation Fund (CEACF) to provide funding for projects that work to protect critically endangered species in Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania.

Lake Victoria supports the worlds largest freshwater fishery which employs over 1 million people, and provides the regions most inexpensive source of dietary protein. Unfortunately, eutrophication and climate change are threatening critical ecosystem services, though the precise impact of these stressors is not clear. Remotely-sensed satellite data is well suited to fill large knowledge gaps and help stakeholders monitor and track ecosystem changes in this and other African Great Lakes.

The Tropical Biology Association supports conservation projects that strengthen the proficiency of their alumni and alumni groups in natural resource management and research. The projects must be designed to solve a specific conservation or research problem in Africa and show impact.

Three types of grants are offered each year:

Tourism in Uganda has over the years witnessed steady growth and is increasingly supporting economic growth and contributing to natural resource conservation. Although studies have been carried out to assess the impact of tourism on natural resources in Uganda, limited attention has been given to examining how tourism developments influence ecologically sensitive shore environments.

The Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment (TESSA) has been developed through a collaboration of institutions with input generously provided by scientists and practitioners from multiple disciplines. The toolkit provides accessible guidance on low-cost methods for how to evaluate the benefits people receive from nature at particular sites in order to generate information that can be used to influence decision making.

Indicator 6.6.1 tracks changes over time in the extent of water-related ecosystems. It uses the imminent date of 2020 in order to align with the Aichi Targets of the Convention of Biodiversity, but will continue beyond that date to align with the rest of the SDG Targets set at 2030. Whereas all ecosystems depend on water, some ecosystems play a more prominent role in the provision of water-related services to society. Consequently, one of the focuses for global monitoring of this indicator is lakes.

Lake Victoria has one of the highest endemic fish species-area-relationships of any freshwater bodies in the world. More than 90% of this diversity is composed of haplochromine cichlids that have undergone an evolutionary radiation in the region into more than 700 endemic species in the past 100,000 years. These species belong to more than 20 different major ecological guilds from large benthic and small pelagic herbivores at one end of the consumer food web to inshore and pelagic fish predators at the other end.

The price of land on the global market is often far below its real value to society. Thsi means that too much has been and is being extracted from the land, degrading it to a dangerous extent. Worldwide, 52 percent of land used for agriculture is moderately or severely affected by land and soil degradation, a widespread phenomenon occurring globally. Recent estimates show that ecosystem service losses from land degradation cost $6.3 to 10.6 trillion annually. Everyone on earth suffers indirectly, and for the 1.4 billion rural poor land degradation has a direct impact on livelihoods.