Congo Basin Pooled Fund

Synchronicity Earth’s Congo Basin Programme support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to defend their territories and rights, helping to protect biodiversity, ecosystems, and human wellbeing for the long term. But many smaller, locally led organisations are difficult to find and support for most funders; our pooled funding approach allows donors to benefit from our experience and networks in the region, including our three Congo Basin affiliates, providing access to dedicated and inspiring individuals and organisations which they would not otherwise be able to reach.

When a donor contributes to the Congo Basin Pooled Fund, their donation will match the needs of the organisations of the ground, responding directly to the knowledge and learning coming from our partners and affiliates in the region. In practice, this means that funding will often be used to help organisations develop and grow, supporting core and staff costs, giving the people with the best understanding of environment they work in autonomy to determine the best ways for them to deliver the conservation and community impacts that we are collectively working towards.

The Congo Basin Pooled Fund acts as a learning platform to bring donors and conservation partners together, strengthening relationships and deepening understanding of the context which, for many donors from the Global North, can be difficult to understand, particularly in terms of the challenges that many smaller organisations are facing. Creating opportunities for communication and knowledge exchange has proven to be a key element of the success of the pooled funding approach.

Donors who contribute to a pooled fund are able to reduce the administrative burden of managing multiple grants for smaller and sometimes hard to reach partners who they might not normally be able to support. Synchronicity Earth works with the programme partners to streamline the reporting process, meeting donor reporting requirements and building a shared understanding among donors of the challenges and successes of each partner.

Pooled funding provides a stable source of long-term, flexible income for partners, often providing for core support, one of the most difficult types of funding to obtain for many smaller organisations. For example, funding for staff salaries can be very hard to obtain, yet without this type of support, organisations are at constant risk of losing their best staff to larger international organisations. The funding provided through the pooled fund is flexible and responsive to the needs of our partners, acknowledging that these can change.

Support from the pooled fund gives our partner organisations the opportunity to meet and become familiar with a wide range of donors. This gives them greater visibility to more funders and in some cases, opens up channels for further direct funding from some of these funders or other funders in their networks.

The Congo Basin Pooled Fund provides a forum not just for donor – conservation partner communication, but it is also a space for peer to peer learning between the individuals and organisations implementing conservation on the ground. Opportunities for peer learning and collaboration are not always easy to organise, but for those partners supported by the Pooled Fund, there are regular opportunities to interact with their peers, share knowledge and experience and collaborate.

With support from a pooled fund, partners are released from the burden of having to write multiple proposals and reports for donors who may have very different reporting processes and requirements.