Advancing Direct and Flexible Finance for Communities

CLARIFI at Scale

Since launching in 2022, RRI’s Indigenous-led funding mechanism, CLARIFI, has funded 186 locally led projects across 29 countries. Working closely with its regional coalition members and the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC), CLARIFI has mobilized more than $40 million in direct financing for IPs, ADPs, and LCs.

Women gather to prepare
food outside of Tebat Pulau,
Sumatra, Indonesia.
Photo: Jacob Maentz
RRI, 2022

In Latin America in 2025, it supported 31 projects and 29 partners, eight of them women-led. A key regional partner is the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund (FTM), which provides accompaniment and technical support to Indigenous and women-led organizations. Through this partnership with FTM, 16 projects across six countries are receiving CLARIFI funding, including four led by women’s organizations. Together, these partners are strengthening their strategic planning, territorial visioning, and administrative systems to become more effective

In 2025, CLARIFI convened two regional learning exchanges in Mesoamerica and the Tropical Andes for 85 IP and ADP participants from 30 countries. Using participatory methodologies, these exchanges documented critical lessons learned from CLARIFI projects, identified effective practices, and developed recommendations for long-term sustainability—bridging organizational strategies with communities’ grounded realities.

“This is unprecedented: 35 women are going to have at least 100 hectares. It is a revolution!”

Local community woman
REFACOF partner, Cameroon

Examples of CLARIFI’s impact through grantmaking in 2025:

  • In Colombia’s Pacific region, ACADESAN has built a community-led protection model linking safety to dignity, rights, and collective well-being through humanitarian infrastructure and strengthened local governance. Leaders stress that defending human rights through the model of collective protection is inseparable from defending land and culture. Despite funding and institutional barriers, partnerships like CLARIFI’s support for ACADESAN demonstrate how scaling collective defense can reduce vulnerability and protect communities.
  • In Cameroon, RRI partner REFACOF—a regional network to promote women’s land and forest tenure rights—strengthened its processes and governance structure to improve decision-making and organizational effectiveness. Members from 16 countries worked together to draft a five-year strategic plan and elected a new regional board. On the ground, REFACOF’s gender-transformative initiative, the LILAGLÈ Protocol, helped secure 35 Customary Land Ownership Certificates for women across five villages in Ngweï, totaling more than 100 hectares. It also inspired 12 additional villages to request replication in their communities.
  • In Nepal, CLARIFI supported the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development (CIPRED) to advance Indigenous self-governance within conservation areas. A Community-Based Monitoring and Information System baseline covering 1,995 households generated the first quantified evidence of Indigenous tenure and livelihoods in these areas. More than 200 leaders—women, youth, and officials—were trained on rights-based conservation and customary law. Two landmark customary governance acts were passed or tabled in Manang and Mustang, demonstrating that local governments can formally recognize Indigenous institutions. The project also supported women-led livelihood initiatives and secured pilot community access permits for non-timber forest products, marking a historic shift from fortress conservation toward rights-based partnership.

Two farmers have a conversation during the cocoa pod harvest in Cameroon.
Photo: Shutterstock

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