Maliasili
Accelerating the growth and impact of community-led conservation in Africa
The Trafigura Foundation is supporting an initiative to grow and strengthen local conservation organisations so they can deliver even more impact for people, nature and the climate.
The challenge
Healthy, well-managed ecosystems provide benefits including food and water security, wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration, making them an essential part of the solution to the interlinked challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. In Africa, most lands are used and managed by communities living there, often holding some form of customary right to these lands. Yet communities often lack the resources, skills, and legal rights to manage lands and natural resources effectively, and local conservation organisations that support these community-led structures face various constraints that may limit their capacity to drive change.
The solution
Maliasili supports the development of community-led conservation across sub-Saharan Africa. It selects high-potential local organisations and provide them with customised, multi-year support in organisational strengthening and leadership development, and increased access to funding to enhance their ability to scale their impact.
Maliasili is strengthening and supporting nearly 60 local organisations working in community-based conservation across 16 countries. Since its inception 15 years ago, Maliasili has supported 75 organisational strategic plans, trained 237 conservation leaders, and raised and leveraged over USD 27 million for its partners. Cumulatively, these local organisations work across 64 million hectares of high-biodiversity-value ecosystems, reach 13.6 million people and help generate USD 12 million annually for communities who are sustainably managing their forests, rangelands and waters.
Partnership impact
With support from the Trafigura Foundation, Maliasili will intensify its support for conservation organisations in five countries: Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Maliasili’s partner organisations will receive support in areas including: strategic planning; monitoring, evaluation and learning systems; communication strategies and products; board governance, team performance and development; fundraising; work planning; and management systems. Managers will also engage in peer-based leadership programmes that build the ability to generate collaboration and collective action amongst different organisations.
Specific goals of the partnership include:
- Supporting 19 conservation organisations and enabling them to increase their annual revenue by 20 percent
- Providing leadership training to 46 African conservation leaders
- Through the work of the supported organisations, improving the management of an additional 2.7 million hectares of biologically rich land and seascapes, where the natural resource-based income of some 676,000 people is maintained or increased by up to 5 percent
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