From top-down conservation to local leadership
When herders move their livestock across a landscape, the animals turn and enrich the soil, and grassland regenerates behind them. It is a generations-old practice, one small instance of a larger truth. The people who live closest to Africa’s wildlife tend to understand it best, yet the funding, recognition, and support tend to flow elsewhere. Maliasili exists to change that, helping community-led organisations get the resources and structure to match what they already know.
For the past hundred years, the people who live closest to the world's most resource- and wildlife-rich areas have been left out, both of conservation work itself and of the decisions made about their own land. In parts of Africa, conservation has, at times, meant local communities being demonised, removed or dispossessed from their homes. This has worn down something hard to rebuild: the practical local knowledge of how to manage a resource well. In some cases, that loss has tracked directly with declining wildlife populations and degraded ecosystems.
You cannot separate the people from the place. Conservation works when it is led by the communities who live in the area, because they know how nature behaves, season by season, in ways no outside programme can replicate.
With that support in place, communities can drive change that protects local nature and biodiversity at a scale that matters globally.
Conservation needs strong leaders to succeed
In traditional funding models, an organisation receives financial support and is then left on its own to carry the work forward. Maliasili's model is instead built on partnership and sustained collaboration.
At the centre of Maliasili's approach is a conviction that investment in people and in leadership is what actually pays off for conservation over time. Real, lasting change only happens when local organisations are strong enough to keep growing independently.
The work began in Tanzania, where Maliasili's founder, Fred Nelson, saw local organisations doing serious work on conservation, wildlife, climate, and livelihoods without the recognition or capacity to match their impact. Maliasili grew out of a simple wish to help organisations with real potential become visible and to give them what they needed to actually deliver on their goals.
What this looks like in practice
Maliasili does not run conservation programmes, instead it strengthens the organisations that do. Rather than the usual top-down capacity-building, it works with a partner on the machinery that keeps an organisation standing: strategy, monitoring and evaluation, team building, board governance, communications and fundraising.
In practice, that support runs usually for about four years and the active partnership phase is built on close, frequent contact, workshops, joint fundraising and shared strategy sessions. But the relationship rarely ends there and Maliasili thinks that once a partner, always a partner. After the active phase, organisations often move into an advisory phase, where support continues on an as-needed basis and sometimes organisations have themselves become experienced enough to mentor newer partners coming up behind them.
In 2014, the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association was two people trying to support a handful of conservancies. A decade on, it has a team of more than two dozen, and Kenya now has over 240 conservancies covering more than a fifth of the country’s land. Maliasili has worked with them throughout.
In Zimbabwe, Dr Moreangels Mbizah’s organisation, Wildlife Conservation Action, was working on one of conservation’s hardest problems, the conflict between people and lions, with deep expertise but little funding, strategic clarity, or means to tell its own story. Maliasili worked alongside it on strategy and communications, and over several years it raised around $1.5 million. Human-wildlife conflict in some of its project areas has since dropped by as much as 92%. Today the organisation is co-convening Zimbabwe’s national Human-Wildlife Coexistence Strategy, and Dr. Mbizah has won a Whitley Award, one of conservation’s most prestigious honours.
Choosing which organisations to work with is important. Maliasili weighs three things: whether the work is rights-focused for the people involved, what real economic or cultural value the community draws from the resource, and how strong the existing governance structures are. Just as important, though harder to formalise, is whether an organisation's leadership is open to growing and changing. Maliasili wants to work with organisations that have real internal motivation to scale and improve their strategy.
Why this matters to us
At RELEX Foundation, we believe that only work at scale will meaningfully address climate change and biodiversity loss, and that scale only comes from patient work that nurtures outcomes built to last. The ability to scale their partners’ conservation impact sits at the heart of Maliasili's work, too.
Maliasili believes in building long-term relationships rooted in trust, shared expertise, and staying close to the people doing the work. Their partners are not simply funded and left to carry on alone. They are given real, practical support, and walked alongside for years, moving towards shared goals together.
Through its work, Maliasili has grown community-led organisations, strengthened their leaders, and helped them reach goals a decade in the making. That work is guided by a clear understanding. What Maliasili changes is where the support flows, and who gets to decide how a place is cared for. Change cannot succeed unless local people have the resources and the power to lead it themselves.
Read more about Maliasili and their partners on maliasili.org.
