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JULY 29TH, 2015

Report highlights need to improve support to African environmental organizations

NAIROBI – African organizations working to improve natural resource management have made great gains, but face serious challenges that limit their efforts to grow and sustain their impact, says a report launched today in Kenya by Maliasili Initiatives and Well Grounded.

The report recommends five ways international donors and NGOs can change the way they support African civil society organizations (CSOs) to ensure they can continue to catalyze positive changes in natural resource governance, management, and conservation.

“African organizations are doing amazing things – work that is essential to sustaining both people and ecosystems,” says Fred Nelson, Executive Director of Maliasili Initiatives. “They are helping rural communities generate income from conserving threatened forests; influencing changes in national constitutions and laws so they better protect the rights of indigenous people and local communities to land and resources; and exposing corruption and malpractice.”

Yet these same organizations face serious organizational challenges related to leadership, human resources, funding, strategy and accountability. Relationships between African CSOs and external actors, such as donors and international NGOs, can provide a critical source of long-term support to local organizations, but if poorly designed can also exacerbate common problems.

But, as the report shows, simple changes to these relationships could address these challenges and improve the performance and sustainability of local African organizations.

The report’s authors interviewed more than seventy leading African CSOs, international organizations, funders, and organizational development experts.

“African CSOs are frequently not given the space, support or resources to realize their full potential,” says Cath Long, Executive Director of Well Grounded. “There are some exceptions to this and those models show potential, but much more needs to be done to document, share, and apply best practices.”

“To fulfill our role we need an enabling environment, which is sometimes missing for us as an organization,” said Makala Jasper, Chief Executive Officer of Mpingo Conservation and Development Initiative, an innovative CSO facilitating community forest management in Tanzania.  “We don’t have adequate resources,” he explained during an interview for this study.

An overarching message of the report is a need for greater reflection, dialogue, and analysis within the natural resource governance field around organizational capacity issues at the local and national scale.

The report’s five core recommendations for improved practice in strengthening African CSOs are to:

  • Improve partnerships between African CSOs and international actors for greater long-term impact, by developing more collaborative and mutually accountable approaches to partnership design, structure, and investment.

  • Change the way support for organizational development is delivered, shifting to more long-term, customized, sustained, and demand-driven support.

  • Support new approaches to organizational leadership development to address one of the major gaps in the African natural resources field.

  • Bolster investments in documentation and learning to build up the base of empirical evidence about practices and impacts of organizational strengthening in the African natural resource management, governance, and conservation fields. This includes improving documentation of many ongoing practices and experiences in long-term investments in local organizations from within this field.

  • Encourage greater dialogue around fundamental organizational issues affecting organizational performance that relate to values, constituent accountability, financial sustainability, and the role and function of CSOs within the wider context of African civil society.

 

The report will be launched at a conference taking place in Nairobi, Kenya, from July 27-30, Building Capacity for Conservation & Resource Management in Africa.

Download the report 

For interviews, contact Jessie Davie (jdavie@maliasili.org)

 

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NOTES TO EDITORS

Maliasili Initiatives

Maliasili Initiatives is a US-based non-profit organization that supports the growth, development and performance of leading civil society organizations and social enterprises working to advance sustainable natural resource management practices in Africa. The organization presently works with nine local partners in Tanzania and Kenya. By integrating customized organizational development services with technical natural resource management expertise, Maliasili Initiatives is helping its partners achieve their full potential and scale up their impact – for people and nature.

www.maliasili.org  

Well Grounded

Well Grounded works with civil society organizations in Africa, mainly in the Congo Basin. More specifically, Well Grounded provides organization development services and support to CSOs that are working with communities to help them assert their rights and to improve natural resource governance. A UK-registered organization, it was established in 2010 and has a small office in London and its main office in Cameroon. It has worked with over forty civil society organizations in the Congo Basin and Liberia on various aspects of organization development. Well Grounded’s collaboration with African CSOs supports them in achieving real change and to show to others that they've succeeded in doing so.

www.well-grounded.org