Vivian Silole is the head of strategic partnerships, collaboration, and sustainability at IMPACT Kenya, an Indigenous-led organization working with pastoralist communities. IMPACT is one of 10 Indigenous Peoples-led organizations implementing the GEF-funded Inclusive Conservation Initiative (ICI), a pioneering global program that channels direct financing to Indigenous Peoples to support biodiversity conservation on their own terms. Speaking during the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, she reflected on what direct access to GEF funding has meant for her organization.
Tell us about IMPACT Kenya and what you do
We are an Indigenous-led organization based in northern Kenya. We work in a pastoralist landscape — communities that have managed these lands for generations, whose identity and knowledge systems are deeply tied to the land and to the animals they herd. Our work is about supporting communities to strengthen their own governance of that landscape, to revitalize their Indigenous knowledge, and to be recognized as the conservation stewards they have always been.
Through the Inclusive Conservation Initiative, we are implementing a five-component model that we co-designed with communities during the project development phase. That is actually one of the things that made this different from the start: communities were not handed a pre-designed intervention. We went to them and asked, “What are your priorities? What do you want to protect?” And we built from there.
What has participating in the ICI meant for your organization?
It has been a learning and relearning experience — for us as an institution, and for each of us individually. By the time we received GEF funding, we had not managed a fund of this scale before. It required us to put systems, policies, and safeguards in place and to build the capacity of our staff. That is not a criticism — it is exactly what direct financing is supposed to do. It builds you up so you can do more.
We have grown as an organization, and the project has helped us attract other partnerships and sources of funding along the way. But more than the institutional growth, what has been most valuable is what it has made possible on the ground. The flexibility within the fund to redirect resources toward shifting community priorities — that is something you rarely find in international finance. In pastoralist contexts, conditions change. You cannot be rigidly committed to a workplan designed two years earlier when a drought has just reshaped everything.
How has the ICI changed how you work with communities?
It has confirmed something we already believed but were not always able to practice: that Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) must be a process, not a procedure. When a community does not understand a particular step, you retract and walk through it again with them. When a community says they do not want to proceed with a particular component, that decision must be respected — that is what FPIC actually means. It is not a checkbox. It is iterative, it is ongoing, and it puts communities in the driver’s seat.
One of our components focuses on biocultural mapping — helping communities document their relationship with their land, past and present. These maps have actually been used by communities to reclaim land that was taken from them, by mainstream conservation actors, by military projects, by large-scale developments. That is powerful. That is conservation finance doing something that matters to people’s lives.
We have also worked with communities to develop biocultural protocols — documents that define how their land is accessed by investors and outsiders, on their terms. And we are currently building community-based monitoring and information systems that integrate both cultural and biological indicators that communities themselves defined. The result is that communities will continue monitoring changes and trends in their landscapes long after the project ends. We are not creating dependency — we are creating ownership.
What have communities taught you?
Patience. And I say that in the deepest and respectful sense. The funding world is built around drafting projects, delivering outputs, demonstrating results. Communities have taught us that real change does not move on a donor’s timeline. Their priorities evolve. Their needs shift. And because we invested in creating a genuine space for dialogue from the beginning — because FPIC was treated as a living relationship and not a signed document — communities trust us enough to tell us when something needs to change.
That trust, that mutual respect, has reshaped how we work across all our programs. It is not just an approach we apply to the ICI project. It has become the way IMPACT operates.
What would you say to the GEF about how to improve?
First, I would say: this is the right direction. We have had long conversations in the international conservation world about direct access and direct financing for Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous-led organizations. There have always been questions about capacity and track record. But you can only strengthen capacity by actually extending trust. The GEF has started doing that, and GEF-9 — with its continued and deepened commitment to Indigenous Peoples — shows that this learning is being taken seriously.
The barriers we faced when applying in GEF-7 were real. Track record requirements, letters of endorsement from government agencies — these are not neutral requirements. Indigenous-led organizations do not always have the kind of institutional footprint that conventional access modalities require. The result is that the organizations closest to the landscape, with the deepest relationships and the clearest understanding of what communities need, are often the furthest from the funding.
My message to the GEF is: continue putting communities first. Simplify access pathways in ways that preserve accountability while opening the door wider for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The model we are building — grounded in biocultural maps, land rights, management plans rooted in Indigenous knowledge, community-led monitoring as evidence-based tools for Indigenous-led conservation — is replicable, scalable and effective. It works. We would love to see GEF-9 support the scaling of this model across more landscapes.
What would you say to other donors about the road ahead?
Direct financing works. But it requires trust that runs in both directions. It also requires donors to invest in their own understanding — of communities’ contexts, of what meaningful engagement actually looks like, of why imposing monitoring frameworks that ignore cultural realities will always produce shallow results.
When we started the ICI project, many communities in our landscape understood conservation as fencing — as excluding people. We have had to work through that, patiently, together, because conservation has a complicated history in these landscapes and people have been harmed by it. That conversation — shifting toward Indigenous-led conservation, toward a recognition that biodiversity is thriving precisely where Indigenous peoples are at the center — is the most important conversation happening in global conservation right now.
We can handle the money. We can deliver the impact. What we need is for donors to believe that — and then get out of the way enough to let us prove it.
