Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative (CLARIFI)

Current projects that promote the natural resource rights and governance of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples receive less than 1 percent of global climate finance. CLARIFI is a funding mechanism that seeks to bridge this gap by providing direct financing to rightsholders’ organizations to strengthen communities’ rights, livelihoods, and climate and conservation activities.

In 2023, we made important strides in scaling up the number of CLARIFI projects as well as the amount of funding reaching communities on the ground. We also launched a new website that now serves as a crucial communications tool to document and share our impact.

In the community of Pucara in Junín, Peru, a Quechua Indigenous woman grows vegetables. | Photo Credit: CAOI/CIAP.

Here are some of our achievements in 2023.

  1. In 2023, CLARIFI mobilized additional funding from the Home Planet Fund and BMZ (the first bilateral to support CLARIFI). Fifty-two active projects in 21 countries have been implemented, with an average grant size of US$136,000. Additional projects are being developed and a pipeline built.
  2. We partnered with the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund (MTF) and Indonesia’s Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) to implement two national and regional-level projects. In Indonesia, AMAN’s project will increase the capacity of 131 territorial administrators and more than 5,400 cadres from the country’s Indigenous communities in organizational and financial management. In Latin America, the MTF project will strengthen at least 15 rightsholder organizations in six countries.

"CLARIFI addresses a need long felt by Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community organizations for a vehicle that mobilizes funding directly to them for activities not yet supported adequately by any donor."

— Pasang Dolma Sherpa CLARIFI Steering Committee member and Executive Director of Nepal’s Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development (CIPRED)

  1. We strengthened CLARIFI’s leadership and governance by appointing Deborah Sanchez, an Indigenous leader from the Miskitu community in Honduras, as director to work in coordination with an Indigenous- and local community-led steering committee. With experience working in various capacities with Indigenous Peoples and local communities on land titling and governance, forest certification, climate change, and economic development projects, Deborah brings a wealth of knowledge to the role and is poised to lead CLARIFI into its next phase of piloting in 2024 and beyond.
  2. We launched a new CLARIFI website to showcase community success stories, news articles, achievements, and key project milestones. The website offers CLARIFI’s partners, allied organizations, and donors a space to read and watch first-hand accounts from the field of how our funding is making a difference on the ground.
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