Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much funding has been (a) allocated and (b) spent as part the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund to date.

In December 2013, Defra and DFID announced that £10m of funding would be made available over the period 2014/15 - 2017/18 to help developing countries tackle the illegal wildlife trade, to be administered by Defra. In March 2015, the Secretary of State for International Development announced that an additional £3m would be made available for this purpose.

Most of this funding, which is Official Development Assistance, is distributed through the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund.

The first round of the UK Government’s Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund opened for applications in June 2014, and 19 successful projects were announced in December 2014. A list of these can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/382616/iwt-challenge-fund-project-funding.pdf

To date, £5.3 million has been allocated to projects under the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund. Projects submit claims against their allocations on a quarterly basis, and the total spent, as at the end of October, was £2.1 million.

I announced the opening of a second round of applications in August. We expect to announce the successful projects from the second round early in the new year.