Case Study

The Civil Society Environment Fund (CSEF)

Client: DANIDA/Royal Danish Embassy and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland | Sectors: Natural Resources

The Civil Society Environment Fund (CSEF) provided Euro 4.6 million grant funding, technical assistance and capacity building support to Zambia’s civil society to support stronger natural resource management across the country delivered through direct project implementation of by civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

Apart from grant support, the project made supporting capacity and resources available for environmental advocacy, and encouraged the growth of research and dissemination for stronger environmental protection.

In delivering CSEF, Ecorys developed comprehensive grant cycle management tools, tailored to the environmental sector and applied in multiple different contexts across the entire country. Other activities included CSO capacity assessments, strategic planning, applied research on civil society coordination and advocacy, and many others. The fund supported specific projects in the following technical areas: Community Based Natural Resource Management; Protected Areas Management; Wildlife and Anti-Poaching; Agroforestry; Livelihoods and Sustainable Organic Agriculture; Environmental Education; Extractive Industries and Pollution; and Water Resource Management, amongst others.

Through these efforts, more than 70 individual Zambian CSOs were assisted to assume front line environmental management roles in Zambia working with key stakeholders in Government, Zambia’s Traditional Leadership, the private sector and crucially with Zambia’s citizens themselves to safeguard the countries rich environmental endowment for current and future generations. This has been achieved through 130+ individual financial grants, and a broad variety of capacity building interventions aimed at transforming these organisations capacity in key areas such as technical natural resource management methodologies; organisational strategy and planning; financial management; and monitoring, evaluation and learning.

• CSOs supported through the principal grant instrument reached 10,233 direct beneficiaries, 45% of whom were female;

• During implementation numerous Grant Partners went on to access further financial support for environmental activities that had been initiated under the CSEF Grant mechanism;

• Over the course of the Project, CSEF supported numerous CSOs to develop, introduce and implement new systems including:

1) Financial Management Systems;
2) Strategic Plans;
3) Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks;
4) Resource Mobilisation Strategies;
5) Advocacy Strategies; and
6) Communications Strategies.