ORGANIZATIONAL Overview
Maliasili Initiatives is a non-profit organization that supports the growth, development and performance of leading
civil society organizations working to advance sustainable natural resource management practices in Africa.
Investing in people for nature.
We partner with leading organizations to provide tailored organizational development services, targeted bridge financing, and technical expertise to strengthen and build leaders to advance sustainable natural resource
management outcomes at landscape, national and global scales.
Strengthening leaders.
In rural Africa the well-being of people and ecosystems is closely interconnected. Successful rights-based management models are
fundamental to improving peoples’ livelihoods while safeguarding ecosystems through the sustainable use of natural resources.
Improving livelihoods,conserving ecosystems.
Local civil society organization(CSOs) are essential to achieving these outcomes. They understand the key issues facing the communities they
work with and are committed to seeking long-lasting solutions.
Driving Change.
Leading African CSOs and social entrepreneurs often face challenges that inhibit the scope and scale of their impact, and opportunities for transformational
change that benefit local people and ecosystems is foregone.
Confronting organizational obstacles.
Our partners’ common needs include:
Identifying needs.
Stronger and better articulated strategy
Incisive business planning and performance monitoring
Effective governance and management structures/systems
Improved finances
Skills and career development opportunities
Enhanced communications
Horizon-broadening and networking opportunities
Cultures of open learning
There is an existing organizational development marketplace in Africa, but the needs of these
leading CSOs and social entrepreneurs are not being adequately catered to.
This is because often the services are generic, one-off and time limited, and they lack a deep
understanding of the context, technical issues and goals that are at the heart of organizations.
We want to fill this gap.
Overcoming Challenges.
We approach organizational development in a holistic way, working with our partners to jointly identify and understand what their needs are.
Together we design an integrated program of organizational development and technical support. Ultimately, we aim to help our partners achieve long-term and sustainable internal growth that will lead to enhanced and scaled up external impacts.
Our approach
Our services and their impact
Stronger and more effective natural resource management civil society organizations and social entrepreneurs
Local livelihoods improved & nature conserved through:• Strong local
resource rights and tenure
• Democratic & devolved governance
• Incentive-based stewardship
Organizational Development
TechnicalExpertise
Services Outcomes Impact
Provide long-term and holistic organizational development support to our partners through integrating our organizational development service offerings with our established technical expertise in the natural resource field.
Contribute to the advancement of policy analysis, program design and innovation in African natural resource management through select technical assignments, initiatives and research.
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What We Do
We seek out outstanding and innovative civil society organizations and social entrepreneurs with high potential for scaling up their reach and impact. We evaluate their track record and need, the nature of the opportunity, and the value we can add.
How we work
1 2 3 4 5SCREEN DESIGN DEVELOP DELIVER EVALUATE
We select
exceptional local
partners for whom
we can add value
and who share our
values
We collaboratively
design a customized
organizational
development
support process
with each partner
We support
the internal
development of each
partner through this
change process
As part of the
change process we
support the external
delivery of improved
outcomes for
communities & their
ecosystems
We evaluate our
performance
and that of our
partners, for
continuing learning
& improvement of
each change process
Since we began operations in 2011, we have helped our partners improve the conservation management of 142,323 hectares of land in East Africa; facilitate enterprises such as tourism, sustainable forestry and carbon offsetting that have generated $169,287 in revenue for rural communities; and have leveraged $965,000 in third-party funding to support our partners’ work.
Increasing impact.
Partner Snapshot
Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT) helped two indigenous minority groups in northern Tanzania obtain a customary land title to approximately 61,000 hectares of land, enabling the Datoga and Hadzabe to permanently own and conserve these areas and protect its boundaries from encroachment. It is this kind of work that makes UCRT the leading grassroots organization working on land and resource rights and community-based management across much of northern Tanzania. We are helping them strengthen their organizational management and performance, addressing a wide range of needs we’ve jointly identified. This includes, strategic planning, work planning and performance monitoring; fundraising assistance; communications support and documentation; building collaborations to scale up UCRT’s work across northern Tanzania’s savannah landscapes; as well as other technical programmatic support.
Carbon Tanzania is helping some of Tanzania’s last remaining hunter-gatherers get paid to maintain their land and its resources as they always have for the last 40,000 years – sustainably. Carbon Tanzania is an early-stage social enterprise that has developed one of Tanzania’s first certified forest carbon projects (REDD) in partnership with the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers in the Yaeda Valley. We are assisting Carbon Tanzania become the leading operator linking community land and resource rights, forest conservation and carbon markets by helping them to develop their business plan, build partnerships across their value chain, and enhance their communications and branding approach.
Partner Snapshot
In the Amboseli ecosystem the same Maasai warriors who used to hunt and kill lions are now protecting them, and populations in this area appear to be on the rise. Over the last five years Lion Guardians has worked in this ecosystem with Maasai Group Ranches, implementing a uniquely successful community-based model for resolving human-lion conflict and fostering co-existence between people and wildlife. We are working with them to develop and implement a new five year strategic plan for scaling up the organization to work at multiple sites covering much of Kenyan and Tanzanian Maasailand, through new partnerships and by training other groups to use their model.
Partner Snapshot
During 2013-2017 Maliasili Initiatives aims to become a leader in our field in delivering organizational development and change management support
to outstanding or high potential civil society organizations and social entrepreneurs working on natural resource management issues in Africa.
Building Leaders.
We will work through a carefully built, expanding and diverse portfolio of leading grassroots and national civil society organizations to build their
capacity, accelerate their impacts, and strengthen their performance.
We will build a proven track record, as demonstrated bythe organizational growth and performance
of our partners.
Facilitating long-termchange & Impact
We strive to achieve a wide range of documented and sustainable impacts on landscape-scale conservation, strengthening community land and resource
rights, improved natural resource governance, and enhanced livelihoods from our partners’ activities.
Creating sustainablelivelihoods & ecosystems
The Maliasili TeamOur board is small but active bringing in expertise from sustainable finance and business development, philanthropic investing, conservation strategy, and non-profit and business management fields.
Our staff currently consists of three technical and management experts with combined experience of over 35 years working on natural resource and development issues primarily in East Africa, with deep experience in organizational strategy, communications, project planning, and policy processes.
Staff and most board members have many years of working closely together pre-dating the formation of Maliasili Initiatives. Both staff and board have strong personal commitments to sustainable development, social justice and natural resource management issues in Africa, and to developing Maliasili Initiatives as a leading vehicle to address these issues.
Fred Nelson - Executive Director
Kipp Baratoff - President of the board
Andrew Williams - Senior Program Manager
Scott O’Connell - Treasurer of the board
Jessie Davie - Communications Manager
Elizabeth Singleton - Member of board
www.maliasili.org