Maliasili Conservation Fund

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More good money for great and impactful organizations →

The Maliasili Conservation Fund (MCF) is a groundbreaking pooled funding initiative launched to provide multi-year, unrestricted support to a portfolio of Africa’s leading conservation organizations.

Inspired by the Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund (MLCF - 2020–2023), the MCF goes further, focusing on advancing innovative, locally-led conservation efforts in East Africa (EA), the KAZA region in southern Africa, and Madagascar.
“If we can get funding that supports our strategic plan, it would be a break-through. The funding we receive is project-based, so a lot of important work is left behind.”
Rahima Njaidi
 Executive Director, Community Forest Conservation Network of Tanzania (MJUMITA)
MCF invests in community-led organization as they address climate, wildlife conservation, local resource rights, and livelihoods, helping to spread innovative and high-impact models, with local roots and leadership at the helm of the African conservation narrative.

With the MCF, we aim to ensure that the best and brightest local organizations have the resources they need to strengthen their operations and amplify their impact.

What's driving us →

Despite the talent, commitment, and impact of local organizations, the global funding architecture has made it exceedingly difficult for local organizations to increase their impact and set the agenda for the African community conservation space. Globally, Indigenous Peoples and local community organizations receive less than 1% of all climate funding. African organizations receive only around 10% of all private philanthropic funding invested across the continent.
Many local conservation organizations are constrained by project-based funding that limits their ability to innovate or address emerging challenges.

The MCF aims at changing that narrative by offering:

→ Unrestricted funding

Empowering partners to align funding with their strategic priorities.

→ Multi-year support

Enabling long-term planning and sustainability.

→ Streamlined processes

Minimizing administrative burdens so partners can focus on their work.

→ Relatively substantial funding

The MCF aims to cover 10% - 25% of a grantee organization’s annual budget during the funding period, with a determined cap.

What we fund →

MCF investments tackle critical challenges at the intersection of:

→ Climate resilience

→ Wildlife conservation

→ Local resource rights

→ Livelihood enhancement

Our funding helps scale locally-rooted solutions, advance leadership, and strengthen the African conservation narrative.

Highlights since we launched in 2023  →

$6.73M

Disbursed as grants to date

26

Partners in three focal geographies
“You feel almost for the first time, that you're trusted as an entity that has been given money to use for conservation work. The way Maliasili staff approach you is as if they're the ones that owe you something that they need to negotiate with you.”
“Just so you know, this time of year, at the end of the 1st quarter, is always our most strained financial time for many varying reasons. And so this massive windfall of funding support has relieved the pressure significantly and for this we are extremely grateful to you all.”
“The clarity of the guidelines and the streamlined approach to grant application management were particularly beneficial, allowing us to reduce administrative burdens and focus our efforts on the effective implementation of our initiatives.”

Funding Partners →

So far, we have raised $12.3M of a revised four-year funding target of $16M from a dedicated group of funding partners. This includes $4M allocated by Maliasili from a 2022 one-time gift from MacKenzie Scott.

Funding Geographies →

Southern Kenya / Northern Tanzania Rangelands

• East Africa's greatest savannah landscapes • National-level momentum for community conservation • Strong and established local and community-based organizations

Madagascar

• Top global biodiversity hotspot • Urgent threats from deforestation and critically endangered species loss. • New and rising Malagasy conservation leaders

Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA)

• A transboundary collaboration between Namibia. Angola. Zambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe • Home to roughly half of all Africa's elephants. • Strong community conservation leadership and existing working models

Grantmaking Principles →

We started this fund to fill a gap for our partners - to get them more and better money. But we also want it to help us and others in our field learn how we can improve funding and grantmaking mechanisms that will result in greater impact overall.

How it works →

Frequently Asked Questions →

Below is a table showing the steps that will be taken to initiate, send out and report on an MCF grant

StepsResponsibleAccountableConsultedInformed
Reach out to partner to determine readiness to receive MCF grant
This discussion should involve questions around:
  • What stage is the partner’s strategic plan? (This helps determine if they can tie the grant back to some tangible goals)
  • What are the core needs of the organization that can be met by this grant? (Are they clear on their growth trajectory, and what their critical needs are for their team?)
  • What are the organizational strengthening needs of the partner which can be done during the granting period?

Other questions to answer are:

  • What is the absorptive capacity of the partner?
  • What grant amount is suitable given the information above, and the allocation available?
Portfolio ManagerRKDPortfolio DirectorBM
Request MCF Grant for the partner; grant discussion debrief with BMPortfolio ManagerRKD and BMPortfolio Director (kept in copy) 
Send out the Expression of Alignment and accompanying documents to partnerRKDPortfolio Manager (kept in copy) Finance team, Portfolio Director
Complete all documents (including bank details) and send backPartnerPortfolio Manager (ensures docs are completed)Portfolio Manager, MCF teamPortfolio Director, Finance team
Send Grant Award Letter; grant payment request to finance team initiatedBM (finance team in copy)RKDPortfolio ManagerPortfolio Director
Note dates down for reporting and inform partnerBMPortfolio ManagerRKDFinance team
Funds releasedGDRKDBMPortfolio Manager, Portfolio Director
Internal dates for checking on grant expenditure and progress (quarterly)BMPortfolio Manager SMT
OSP carried out in support of partner and grantPortfolio ManagerPortfolio DirectorPortfolio DirectorMCF team, FN
Annual M & E Indicators collectedPortfolio ManagerKCPortfolio DirectorMCF team, FN
Send reminder for report deadline (30-day window) with report template attachedBMRKDPortfolio Manager 
Review reportPortfolio ManagerRKDBM, GDFN, Portfolio Director
File reportBMRKD Portfolio Director, Finance team

 

Having co-created a pilot with our partners (the Maasai Landscape Conservation Fund), and collated diverse views through the Greening the Grassroots report, six main features of the Maliasili Conservation Fund that make it different and responsive to the needs of local organizations are:

  • Growth Capital: This fund aims to provide substantial growth capital to partners, calculated at approximately 10-25% of their project budgets, with a maximum grant size of $250,000.
  • Multi-year support: Each partner will receive funds from the MCF for 4 years
  • Core support: The grants are primarily to invest in the organization and its growth, leveraging funding that goes into specific programmes or projects, and allowing the organization to invest in itself, remain stable through shocks and grow. 
  • Minimal reporting: We want to ensure that our partners can get on with the work, and not feel that they are tied down by laborious reporting, so we keep our requirements to the minimum.
  • Strategic Goals: The MEL data collected every year will be essential to ensuring reporting requirements are low. The grants will be tied to the strategic goals of each organization, not to any specific goals of ours, as is the case for many granting organizations.
  • Organizational Development Support: There will be an allocation for organizational development support to allow us to work with the partner through the year on various aspects of their growth and vision as an organization.

There were several concerns raised around the issue of compliance during the team retreat. This section tries to address some of them including how we avoid corruption and what happens if funds are misused or used unethically. 

Our grantmaking to partners is built on trust in the due diligence process and through the relationship with them as part of our portfolio. What we have gathered about the partner’s capability will bolster confidence in the partner to be able to use the money in the ways that we are expecting. There is a crucial need for Portfolio Managers to communicate any concerns they have from working with grantees or through observations they make or feedback they receive from members of the community. 

Secondly, we rely on Portfolio Managers to have conversations to determine the readiness of these partners to absorb this funding effectively and in alignment with acceptable accounting practices. The initial discussion with the Portfolio Manager about getting an MCF grant will be critical because that is the discussion that will determine what the funds will be used for and ideally will help fill the sections of the Expression of Alignment. That process requires the partner to be honest and to really flesh out what they are hoping to do with the funds and how they are hoping this grant will help with their team growth, their core work, and how then this ties back to their strategic goals.

Unlike the MLCF however, the MCF grants will not require a detailed budget to report on. This means the MCF is practicing trust-based philanthropy in a very literal sense - we must trust the partner to do what was agreed upon and to let us know if they change their plans through the year. What the MCF is interested in is impact. Coming back to the strategic goals set to see how the partner is progressing and also to watch the trajectory of growth of the organization (number of funders, team growth and health, pay scales, etc.) will show us if the fund is having the effect we are expecting over time.

The answer below attempts to cover questions around the partner’s capacity to absorb funding, how we support the partner to aspire to grow not just to get funding, and how we reduce dependence.

Partner Capacity: We have a basic model showing what is available for each partner in the fund. That is not to say that the partner must take up the full amount immediately. It simply means that the money is available. In terms of the partner capacity to absorb this funding, the portfolio manager in consultation with their portfolio director can determine what amount a particular partner should be offered and therefore should be planning for.

Growth and Dependence: Our organizational strengthening plans already work towards making sure that partners, regardless of whether they are receiving MCF funding, should be growing and becoming less dependent on any one funder. Over time, our OD support should help diversify their portfolio, and their funding streams to be able to attract new sorts of funding.

Getting this injection from the MCF is just like getting funding from any other new funder. Considering the grant is only a small percentage of their total budget (10-25%), this should not deter this partner from continuing down the path of diversification of their funding flows. On the contrary, it should stabilize the partner and allow their leadership space and time to plan, innovate and leverage the rest of their funding. 

Discussions the partner has with their portfolio team should reinforce the partner’s strategic thinking about their future and the sustainability of their organization. Remind the partner that this four-year period will end, and keep an eye on the indicators that are showing their fundraising diversification over time.

Monitoring, evaluation and learning of the MCF is embedded in the Amplify pillar. Since May 2023, the Amplify pillar team has been receiving critical inputs from the Conservation Impact Accelerator group which seeks to “help partners establish a baseline of their current approach to impact assessment, and then lead them through a collaborative visioning process to devise a strategy for updating their impact framework and embedding it across their portfolio.” The group includes Stephanie Dolrenry and Meghan Jones, working with Salisha and Kasmira. So far, the group has helped clarify the Theory of Change of the Amplify pillar, and has worked on ascertaining that some of the recent outputs of the pillar including the Rooting for Change report and the Forum align with the original purpose and are achieving the results they set out to. Their scope includes work on the MCF, which, together with the direct partner fundraising efforts across the board will need to show that over time, we are supporting the change we want to see with regards to providing more and better funding to the point of impact.

The MCF will not fund for-profit activities, and will also not fund individuals. All MCF funding is directed to local organizations.

The answer below will attempt to reflect on how we are trying to ensure that we do not become like the granting organizations we are now working to change.

First, we must go back to our core. Maliasili’s purpose is to build stronger organizations and stronger leaders for greater conservation impact. Our core mandate is to walk the journey with partners through strategy, communications, fundraising, MEL etc and to help them flourish as leaders. This bears repeating because, unlike other organizations, our primary work is not funding. So as we are searching for partner organizations, our criteria will not change. We will still do thorough due diligence based on the criteria that we have always held, looking for organizations that share our three-legged-stool approach to CBNRM of rights, governance and benefits. So even as we anticipate that we may get more Expressions of Interest to join our portfolio merely for the funding, our criteria, partner selection and due diligence processes will keep us aligned to our mission.

All this said, every grantor starts with the best intentions. We therefore have clear plans in place for ourselves to keep the power dynamics equitable.

  1. Holding to our grantmaking principles: Power dynamics often arise from scarcity. When a grantee doesn’t know if they will qualify for a new grant, or if they think that conditions will change, they will often hustle to keep the grantor happy. In our case, each partner knows that their money is in the bank for the four years of the granting period, and that the funds are tied to their strategic goals. This should reduce scarcity concerns and allow for us as partners to share challenges, changes and progress more freely. 
  2. Co-creation with partners: The Maasai Landscapes Conservation Fund was co-created by Maliasili and the partner grantees of the fund. Together, the grantmaking principles were created, including core funding, multi-year funding, and some exploratory grants. The MCF will be constituting an advisory body representative of the geographical regions of the fund in keeping with this system, to ensure that we keep the partnerships equitable, and that any concerns are addressed.
  3. Ringfence the portfolio team

The MCF is built to fill a specific niche, attracting funds from donors and granting organizations who would not ordinarily be able to reach dozens or hundreds of small organizations across Africa. For this reason, it is unlikely that any of the donors to the fund would have been funding a local organization directly in a small part of a country and are now instead putting money into the MCF. If we hear about such a scenario, we would discourage any funder from diverting their funds to us.

We continue to hold to the principle that if funders are able to give directly to local organizations, they should, and we will find all possible ways to help them reach these local organizations across geographies. The MCF is only one of a suite of mechanisms that serves to hasten the localisation of funding to the point of impact. 

Lastly, we will continue to support our partners who are outside of the MCF geographies to fundraise and keep their organisations thriving and achieving impact. We will be developing a matrix to show who we have supported and introduced to partners, to ensure all the partners in our portfolio are supported.

Maliasili exists to help talented local conservation organizations overcome their challenges and constraints so that they can become more effective agents of change in their landscapes, communities, and nations.

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Maliasili is designated as a public charity (501c3) organization by the Internal Revenue Service.