About: The Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund is a collaborative initiative 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.

Communities offer lasting solutions for a healthy landscape

Despite these challenges, successful community-driven conservation on a large scale can protect this landscape for the future. Conservancies in Kenya and Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) in Tanzania are community-conservation models that are proving effective for people and nature and gaining momentum. Now is the time to strengthen and grow these efforts for long-term success.

Local organizations are delivering solutions, but they need better support

The most important work in this landscape is carried out by committed and local conservation organizations that deliver solutions at the community level. Local organizations have strong roots in their communities, the ability to facilitate complex community processes, and the leadership and credibility to effect lasting change. But these local organizations are constrained by a lack of funding that can allow them to grow and focus on the areas they need and want to in order to thrive and expand their impact.

Similarly, private funders who wish to support leading community conservation initiatives in this region lack a mechanism to do so efficiently, effectively, and in a way that offers impact at scale, beyond isolated projects.

An investment in long-term conservation benefits

The Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund invests in a carefully curated portfolio of leading African conservation organizations, in order to increase their impact, coordinate their work more effectively, and provide tailored investments in their long-term organizational capacity and leadership. It also provides a new, innovative model of collaborative, pooled private capital that is designed to showcase ways of investing in the most capable and effective African organizations working in the field. The Fund will invest approximately $3 million in leading local organizations and their work over the next three years.

Conservation Strategy

The Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund will achieve results by focusing on the most important conservation issues and opportunities in the landscape. The Fund’s investment strategy is based on the following assumptions:

• Conservation success in this landscape depends on locally-driven actions to protect key habitats, safeguard wildlife from illegal use, and resolve conflicts between people and wildlife.

• Communities will support conservation efforts based on the alignment of conservation with their social, cultural, and economic interests.

• The greatest long-term threat to conservation in this landscape is conversion of communal rangelands and open habitats to agriculture, fenced plots, and settlements.

• The greatest conservation priorities involve establishing effective and financially viable local conservation and land management entities that maintain large, connected habitats through integrated livestock and wildlife use.

Partners

The Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund is managed by Maliasili, and developed in partnership with the Liz Claiborne & Art Ortenberg Foundation and BAND Foundation. Additional funding is provided by JPMorgan Chase and the Acacia Conservation Fund.