UNGUJA, Tanzania — Decades before they would partner to build a marine conservation organization together, Ali Thani and Lorna Slade crossed paths in Tanzania. Years later, Slade returned to the East African country researching tourism for her master’s degree when she became involved in an initiative aimed at strengthening the knowledge and rights of local resource stewards. Then came the 2008 global financial crisis. The organization backing the initiative withdrew from Tanzania, providing only a fraction of the funds it had earlier promised — $25,000 — and an idea worth pursuing. “So they said, ‘OK, well, it’s a good idea. We have $25,000, so here you are,’” Slade recalls. That modest beginning would eventually become the Mwambao Coastal Community Network, a locally rooted organization now working with coastal communities across Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania, with an annual budget of around $3.5 million. For Thani, a coastal Tanzanian who had worked in government and with larger conservation organizations, Mwambao grew from a conviction that conservation could not simply be designed elsewhere and brought to communities. People who depend on natural resources, he says, should have the knowledge, capacity, and authority to help manage them. That idea has wider resonance as countries pursue the global goal of conserving 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. Local organizations and communities are expected to shoulder much of that work, even as many struggle to secure the long-term funding available to larger international organizations and intermediaries. Mwambao’s work includes supporting community fisheries management,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

NEW YORK — Long before Dickson Kaelo became one of the leading voices for community conservancies in Kenya, conservation was something much more personal. He grew up with livestock. His father was a veterinarian. And he knew firsthand the uneasy relationship between pastoralist communities and wildlife: Lions killing cattle, elephants destroying crops, hyenas taking goats — sometimes dozens of sheep in a single night. “That’s their (communities’) food. That’s what they sell to get fees to take their children (to school),” Kaelo, a member of Kenya’s semi-nomadic pastoralist Maasai community, told Mongabay. Fresh from college nearly three decades ago, Kaelo began wondering whether there was another way, something between conflict with wildlife and a conservation model that excluded communities from protected areas. Working with elders near the northern Maasai Mara, he helped organize a community trust (an organization created by community members to collectively manage land, resources or revenues for their shared benefit) in 1998. It built dams and dispensaries, supported hundreds of students through scholarships and experimented with generating tourism income while keeping livestock on the landscape. Then it fell apart. While Kaelo was away studying wildlife, the land under the care of the trust was subdivided into individual holdings. He considered abandoning conservation altogether. “One part of me was saying, it’s time to give up and go out to the city and do something,” he recalled. Instead, Kaelo returned to the same landscape with a belief that land could be privately owned but still managed collectively. Between 2004…This article was originally published on Mongabay