New online tool is first to track funding to Indigenous, local and Afro-descendant communities

Developers have rolled out the first ever interactive online tool to track all funding for Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant peoples’ forest stewardship and land tenure.

The Path to Scale dashboard, developed in a partnership between the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN), provides information on funding from 133 donors since 2011 based on publicly available information. According to the developers, this publicly accessible dashboard will help donors, NGOs and rights holders identify critical funding gaps and opportunities in global efforts to secure communities’ rights.

“I believe it’s difficult, especially for the more locally rooted organizations, to understand who the acting donors are and what kind of funding they are providing to which actors,” said Torbjørn Gjefsen, RFN’s senior forest finance adviser. “So, this tool can help fill that information gap.”

For donors, the dashboard will help them learn how their peers are fulfilling their commitments, whether they’re increasing direct funding, and reduce duplication of funding.

Launching the dashboard was timely, say the developers, to keep track of the progress and setbacks around funding global environmental initiatives investing in community conservation and land rights. At the COP26 U.N. climate conference in 2021, the Forest Tenure Funders Group (FTFG) announced a $1.7 billion commitment to support tenure rights and guardianship of Indigenous peoples and local communities by 2025. At the U.N. biodiversity conference a year later, targets included funding pledges and a goal to protect 30% of Earth’s land and waters while respecting Indigenous rights and territories.

“Securing the tenure rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afrodescedant peoples is critical to keep forests standing and key ecosystems intact,” said Bryson Ogden, director of rights and livelihoods at RRI. Studies show that an estimated 36% of the world’s remaining forests and up to 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity are found within Indigenous territories.

The Path to Scale dashboard estimates that at least $10 billion is required by 2030 to support the recognition of an additional 400 million hectares (990 million acres) of tropical forests for IPs, LCs and ADPs to achieve the 2030 climate and conservation goals.

Compiling this data also revealed many trends, Ogden said.

“Behind each activity are lengthy project documents, lots of text, and complex budgets. It’s a lot of information for a person to read and analyze, particularly considering that we are talking about thousands of documents,” he told Mongabay, “but our team used a series of large language models to help scan through the text which helped us to understand the trends and types of projects that are being funded, including what donors have been funding historically, and trends that have taken on more importance recently.”

Users can filter by geography, search by keywords like “support for women,” take a closer look at specific groups within the broader category of IPLCs, and see what funding trends look like in areas like the Congo Basin, Brazil or Southeast Asia.

For example, there was no evidence of an increase in direct funding to IPLC organizations or communities despite the increased presence of Indigenous-led funding mechanisms that aim to channel funds directly to these groups. And although there’s been an increased diversity of funding, evidence from the data shows that existing mechanisms have been able to meet at most 30% of community-led funding proposals.

Access to direct funding is a contentious and complex issue within Indigenous organizations, as funding for their projects tends instead to pass through intermediaries, like the state, development banks or NGOs. At the other end, donors also say they face a host of challenges funding directly to IPLC groups and organizations.

Often, big funds have conditions and criteria that Indigenous and local organizations can’t meet, effectively locking them out of access to the funds.

“If you look at the Green Climate Fund or the World Bank funding arrangement historically, they have state-driven ownership in accessing resources, and these arrangements certainly will not be optimal for Indigenous people because they are excluded and marginalized by the very structures of the state,” said Kimaren ole Riamet, a Maasai leader from Kenya and founder-director of the organization Indigenous Livelihoods Enhancement Partners (ILEPA).

Riamet, who helped develop the dashboard, said the requirements for accessing funding from several donors, including the Green Climate Fund, are so restrictive that Indigenous people can’t access it.

“For example, they would require a certain portfolio of resources showing that you are funded before, or [that] you have 10 years of audited accounts, while these are young community-based organizations working on the ground,” he told Mongabay.

Riamet said he believes launching this dashboard can help monitor access to funds and resources according to thematic or geographical areas, especially in situations where direct funding is low. In Kenya, about 75-80% of the country’s total area is pastureland, woodland and bushland, which are often less funded because they’re not the tropical forests that interest the carbon market.

“If indeed we are targeting Indigenous people, then we should reflect the diversity of livelihoods, ecosystems and traditional knowledge landscapes, so I think a tool can reflect all the dynamics to be aware and fill the gap of limited access to resources,” Riamet said.

According to the FTFG’s 2023 report, only 2.1% of funding allocated for communities went directly to them, down from 2.9% in 2021. However, Gjefsen said he believes direct funding from donors is likely to increase in the coming years as community-led organizations are doing the work to set up funds that can receive them.

“But it also depends on the donors, who have to adjust their systems and prioritize direct funding,” he said.

The transparency this dashboard provides can also be a way to hold donors and organizations accountable, and build trust between them, sources told Mongabay.

Analyzing trends in the dashboard also reveal that funding to IPLCs in Africa and Southeast Asia increased, while Latin America, which historically received comparatively more funding for tenure and forest guardianship, saw a decrease in funding.

In 2023, multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, accounted for 42% of total disbursements. Funding from private foundations increased from 8% to 17% of the total funding between 2016 and 2019.

“Donor funding for these communities tenure and forest management has increased significantly in recent years, partly driven by increasing scientific evidence of these groups’ vital role in conserving ecosystems,” said Kevin Currey, program officer for natural resources and climate change at the Ford Foundation, one of the donors to the COP26 pledge. “But gaps remain in donor coordination and reporting,” he added.

Gjefsen and Ogden said there are a few limitation undermining the dashboard’s ability to trace funding in a highly detailed way, including what specific kind of project or organization the funding is being used for. The data they use are limited to publicly available information that donors choose to report.

“What donors are reporting is the first transaction, which is the project document and can include other sub-implementing organizations that would receive parts of the grant, but it’s not done consistently in a way that enables us to trace that funding — resulting to a gap in understanding what happens beyond that first transaction,” Gjefsen said.

Rukka Sombolinggi, an Indigenous Torajan leader from Indonesia and secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), said these targeted communities are looking forward to opportunities to work with donors and that the dashboard would help them hold the donors accountable.

“Communities know how much money we are receiving, but we also need to know how much is being disbursed in our name,” she said. “When donors and NGOs collaborate with us directly, their funding makes greater impact than when disbursed through intermediaries — the Path to Scale dashboard can accelerate this trend.”

Banner image: A reforestation project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Image by Axel Fassio/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

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