As Africa looks for billions to restore degraded land and build resilience to drought, pastoralists say the people managing vast rangelands cannot remain an afterthought in the financing conversation.
Across much of Africa, some of the continent’s most important landscapes are managed not by conservation organisations or large investment projects, but by communities whose livelihoods depend directly on the land.
For pastoralists, rangelands are grazing areas, sources of water and food, migration routes and cultural landscapes. They are also biodiversity-rich ecosystems that support wildlife and provide important ecological functions.
Yet pastoralists remain insufficiently represented in conversations about biodiversity finance.
This gap surfaced during discussions in Nairobi on implementing a human-rights-based approach to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, where participants raised concerns about whether financing mechanisms are reaching the people who live with and manage biodiversity every day.
The question is particularly relevant for Africa, where pastoralism remains an important livelihood system across drylands stretching from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa and into Eastern and Southern Africa.
The challenge is not simply that there is too little money.
It is also about where the money goes, who can access it and whose knowledge is recognised when financing decisions are made.
From global billions to the rangelands
The financing challenge became clearer during the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in August.
For Africa, these figures have a direct connection to pastoral landscapes. The continent’s rangelands cover enormous areas and support millions of people and livestock. They are also under increasing pressure from drought, land degradation, changing rainfall patterns, competition over land and water, and the expansion of other land uses.
UNCCD estimates that rangelands cover more than half of the Earth’s land surface and support around two billion people globally.
At COP17, governments and financial institutions discussed blended finance, guarantees, insurance, concessional resources and private investment as potential ways of closing the land-finance gap. The meeting also launched the Drought Resilience Investment Facility to help mobilise finance for drought resilience, water infrastructure and integrated land and water restoration.
These instruments could provide opportunities for African drylands. But they also raise another question: will pastoral communities be able to access them?
A large infrastructure project or commercial restoration venture can be packaged as a conventional investment. A pastoralist community protecting grazing land, maintaining traditional mobility routes or restoring degraded rangeland may not fit easily into the same model.
This is where the financing conversation needs to change. Pastoralists should not be seen only as vulnerable communities requiring support when drought strikes. Their knowledge and land-management practices can form part of the solution to biodiversity loss, land degradation and drought resilience.
Who gets to decide?
The human-rights-based approach discussed at the Nairobi biodiversity meetings offers one way of looking at the problem.
It shifts the conversation from simply delivering projects to asking whether people have meaningful participation in decisions affecting their lives and territories.
For pastoralists, that means being involved before financing priorities are decided, rather than being consulted after projects have already been designed.
It also means recognising that pastoralism is not one uniform system. Women, young people, elders and different pastoralist communities can experience land-use changes and conservation policies differently.
The same principle applies to biodiversity finance. If funding is intended to support conservation and restoration, financing systems need to capture who is contributing to those outcomes and who bears the costs.
This requires better data, including information that can show the participation and benefits of different groups, rather than reporting only the overall amount of money invested.
For pastoralists, the issue can be particularly important because many of the landscapes they manage sit outside conventional protected areas.
Their contribution to biodiversity therefore may not appear in the same way as the work of a national park or formally recognised conservation project.
Yet wildlife and pastoralism can coexist across many African landscapes, making community participation an important part of conservation and land-management strategies.
The finance question is therefore also a recognition question. If pastoralists are expected to help conserve biodiversity, restore land and build resilience to drought, their role needs to be reflected in the financial architecture supporting those objectives.
UNCCD COP17 demonstrated that the international community understands the scale of the land-finance challenge. The next test is whether new financing mechanisms can move beyond large commitments and reach the communities managing landscapes at ground level.
For Kenya and other African countries facing increasing drought and pressure on drylands, this could become increasingly important.
Pastoralists are already making decisions every day about livestock, grazing, water and movement in landscapes that are central to Africa’s ecological and economic future.
The question now is whether the finance designed to protect those landscapes will recognise them as partners in conservation and restoration, rather than simply recipients of assistance.
Africa does not only need more biodiversity finance. It needs financing that understands the people, livelihoods and knowledge systems already sustaining its landscapes.
