Darwin Initiative Extra

Support for developing countries to conserve biodiversity, reduce poverty and meet their objectives under specific biodiversity conventions.

The Darwin Initiative is one of Defra’s Biodiversity Challenge Funds, along with Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund and Darwin Plus. It competitively awards grants for biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction activities in eligible countries, helping these countries meet their commitments under the Multilateral Environment Agreements, Sustainable Development Goals, and national policy.

The Darwin Initiative will support and influence stakeholders to incorporate biodiversity considerations in achieving poverty reduction, through evidence and best practices, and targeting the outcome: Stakeholders, including local communities, governments, demonstrate sustained improvement in policy and practice that results in gains for biodiversity and reduced poverty.

Elements of successful Darwin Initiative projects are likely to include:

• Enhancing the Capability and Capacity of national and local stakeholders, to help ensure a project’s long-term legacy
• Delivering outputs that will achieve both biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction
• Strengthen the adoption or use of evidence and best practices in biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction.

Darwin Initiative Extra grants are intended for approaches that are on a clear scaling pathway: building on good evidence from smaller projects to demonstrating the potential to scale further by completion, delivering strong results for biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction. This can be through landscape or replication scaling, or through delivering systems change which will have sustained impact beyond the project’s original scale.