RRI’s 2014-2015 annual review, entitled Looking for Leadership, highlights the importance of civil society groups and movements around the world in working to bring about stronger community land and forest tenure. Strong, resourceful, and sustainably financed and managed civil society organizations (CSOs) are a critical element of the leadership that is needed to catalyze new reforms, facilitate community management initiatives, and build new movements for change.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, these issues are even more pressing and urgent. African governments maintain legal control over around 95% of all forests, and the past decade has witnessed a surge in land acquisition and granting of concessions for both renewable and extractive natural resources.  At the same time, though, new opportunities are arising. There are a range of land and forest governance policy reform processes taking shape, in countries from Senegal to Democratic Republic of Congo to Kenya, as well as promising and scalable community-based natural resource management models in places like Namibia and Tanzania.  Talented and committed CSOs are playing a key role in advancing both policy reform and community-level facilitation and empowerment. Yet they also face serious threats from a wave of new legal restrictions on foreign funding and freedom of information that have been instituted in recent years in countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya. Moreover, CSOs in African countries are frequently constrained by their own organizational capacity, which is exacerbated by inappropriate funding models, short-term project cycles, human resource shortfalls, and weak strategic focus and documentation of impact.

A new study supported by RRI and carried out jointly by Maliasili Initiatives and Well Grounded, explores these issues. The study provides a broad assessment of the major organizational challenges facing leading African CSOs in areas such as staffing, funding, leadership, and strategy, as well as more complex issues that relate to organizational accountability, constituencies, and financial sustainability.  It also reviews trends in external support of African CSOs by funders and international organizations, which play a key role as partners to many leading African organizations by providing funding, access to networks, and technical support.

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 role of strong CSOs is widely recognized as critical to sustained change and impact in natural resource governance and tenure, yet relatively few funders and international organizations have a clearly articulated approach for supporting any sort of strengthening process for their local partners or grantees.  And while a range of notable examples and models of effective capacity development and organizational strengthening exist, there is little documentation, information sharing, or consistent application of best practices.  Improved thinking and practice around organizational capacity strengthening has the potential to complement and amplify other investments in strengthening local rights over forests and other natural resources, and is essential to the long-term sustainability of impacts and change at local and national scale.

The report highlights five practical recommendations for improved impact through strengthening African CSOs:

• 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 organization development support is delivered, shifting to a more long-term, customized, sustained, and demand-driven organizational support paradigm.  There needs to be greater understanding of the shortcomings and limitations of many conventional approaches to capacity building as a part of this shift.
• 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 CSO performance that relate to values, constituent accountability, financial sustainability, and the role and function of CSOs within the wider context of African civil society.