From Pledges to Practice: Shifting Conservation Funding Approaches to Better Support Local African Organizations

Local organizations are growing and strengthening community-led conservation across Africa, creating innovative solutions that conserve biodiversity, address climate change, and meet the needs and aspirations of people. Despite their widespread achievements, however, getting the resources that they need is a major challenge.

With the increasing recognition of the importance of locally-led efforts in addressing global challenges, and in line with global calls for more equity in conservation, an urgent priority is to get more funding to the local civil society organizations working alongside and in service of the local communities that steward and manage the majority of Africa’s biodiversity and ecosystems. 

The goal of this report is to outline principles and practices that can guide the development of funding approaches that are more supportive and enabling of the efforts of local conservation organizations. To do this, we draw from interviews with a handful of “early mover” international funders who are intentionally thinking about and shifting their approaches to supporting conservation in Africa. Based on their experiences and learnings, we identify building blocks (the principles and practices) of more effective and equitable funding approaches and use them to illustrate how this transition can be achieved. Our hope is that this report will inform the evolution of the wider conservation funding ecosystem and provide specific guidance for other funders interested in making similar meaningful shifts. 

This report builds on earlier research and analysis to understand the constraints around conservation funding in Africa. While the emphasis here is on Africa since that is where Maliasili and Synchronicity Earth’s efforts are concentrated and where we have networks of partners to inform this analysis, the principles and practices outlined here are much more broadly applicable.