Maasai Landscape COnservation Fund
Investing in community-based organizations to achieve lasting conservation in East Africa’s iconic savannah landscapes.
Greening the Grassroots
The report seeks to shed light on the key barriers and challenges that both CSOs and funders face, and to develop initial recommendations around ways to improve funding practices to better support African organizations.
African protected AReas Congress 2022
We co-hosted the Sustainability & Resilience Pavilion, an active and lively hub focused on promoting conservation efforts that put people at the heart of conservation.
We work to amplify our partners’ voices and influence and to help them get more and better funding.
“Africans have the capacity to deliver. Let donors give us money and we will do well.”
—John Kamanga, Executive Director, South Rift Association of Land Owners (SORALO), Kenya
In a recent report, Maliasili found that African CSOs face serious challenges in accessing the funds they need to achieve and increase their impact:
We want to change this.
Together with partners we’ve developed the Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund, designed to accelerate the impact of community-based conservation solutions across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania’s savannah landscapes by investing in high-performing local organizations.
We are working to scale this approach so we can get more money directly into the hands of those leading conservation on the ground.
By 2025, we want to see:
At least $100 million in new funding commitments going to community-based conservation organizations.
$40 million in new, enabling funding to our portfolio partners through new funding mechanisms within Maliasili and through collaborations with other organizations
Putting community-conservation on the map, and African conservation leaders in the spotlight
We want to see our partners increase their access to donors and decision-makers and amplify their voice and influence.
The African Protected Areas Congress
The first-ever IUCN African Protected Areas Congress (APAC) was held in Rwanda July 18 - 23 2022. It was an opportunity to set an agenda for conservation efforts across Africa for the near-future. More than 2,000 African leaders, citizens and interest groups assembled to discuss and plan how protected and conserved areas can most effectively safeguard Africa’s nature, wildlife & biodiversity while also promoting sustainable development and conserving the region’s cultural heritage and traditions.
Our goal for APAC was for our partners- the leading local and national organizations advancing community conservation around the region- to have a strong presence and influence at the conference. We co-hosted the Sustainability & Resilience Pavilion, an active and lively hub focused on promoting conservation efforts that put people at the heart of conservation
More than 20 of our partners from seven countries, and over 60 staff from partner and organizations in our various leadership cohorts joined us in Kigali.
Speaking to them, our colleague John Kamanga of SORALO said "the future of African conservation is right here."
WATCH: Key messages at APAC
