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Plants are essential to everyone's lives. Welcome to Plantlife.

Medicinal plants and livelihoods

The aim of this initiative is to build capacity for the conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants. Case studies of good practice will be recorded and made available for others to use.

The conservation of medicinal plants is a huge challenge and Plantlife seeks to collaborate with organisations with similar purposes. The Medicinal Plants Conservation Initiative has been generously supported by grants from the Allachy Trust and the Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation.

Allachy Awards

Thanks to the generosity of the Allachy Trust, Plantlife was able to provide grants for conservation of medicinal plants, starting in September 2005 and with the programme largely completed in 2008.

The purpose of the awards was to build capacity for the conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants. Projects selected for awards have taken community-based approaches to medicinal plant conservation. All awards given have been concentrated in the geographical regions of the Himalayas and East Africa.

Additionally, several projects of a supportive nature have been funded. These included a regional meeting on conservation of medicinal plants in Kathmandu, Nepal (September 2006), an international course on medicinal plant conservation held at Bangalore, India (October 2006) and a China/India/UK Di

Please note that no new grants are currently available.