The Cagayan de Oro Landscape on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines has a burgeoning multi-stakeholder platform working to bring agricultural development in line with biodiversity protection and human wellbeing. They are an early tester of the LIFT methodology. Learn more about their experience from local project leader Hilly Roa Ann Quiaoit of Samdhana International.
Bring together the financial institutions and private sector players in your landscape – at your stakeholders’ table – and share opportunities/plans together. Grow your ideas into business plans with the right people in the room – and surprise yourself with what emerges.
In our CDO landscape, we did the first part of LIFT already. It made us partner with a major manufacturing company that goes into plantation of cocoa for chocolate. It’s called Kennemer, a European-based company. Because of LIFT, we have talked to Kennemer and they are willing to partner with us to do our restoration work. They are mostly concentrated in Southern Mindanao so working with us will expand their operations to Northern Mindanao. When we do restoration in the landscape, we realize we need to do it in an agro-reforestation type where we can intercrop the indigenous trees with a commercially viable commodity, and this time it will be cocoa. And here, we will do it in the high risk areas that we have identified. These are mostly slopes. We are now really coming up with business cases that will now be finalized to go into the partnership with Kennemer for farming, for the restoration effort.
Pioneered in Silicon Valley, used by entrepreneurs the world over, now adapted to support social enterprise development for your landscape initiative.
You’ll identify and assess potential sources of financing for your projects. Educate financial sector actors in the landscape about the landscape partnership and the Landscape Action Plan. Find out who’s ready to make investments today, and who needs a bit more cultivation.
LIFT is actually taking off from another IUCN tool... and there, we realized the need for bringing in the business sector. It was a good workshop with the LIFT tool because it brought together the different financial players in our landscape. It brought business experts, finance analysts, local development banks, financial cooperatives. And LIFT was able to bring together these institutions...and they realized that they can actually go into green financing because many of their peers are going to go into that as well...and so, bringing them together was an eye opener. There are now local investors that we realized that we can tap on and are willing to cooperate with us. There are existing financial flows that are in the area that we can actually also tap for restoration. LIFT helped us to understand the local businesses that we have and how we can expand existing PES that we have and get more funds to support the restoration.
This tool provides a simple template to build a basic "targets" list for who could provide finance for your business plans. Start by putting anyone you can think of here, and then refine by asking tough questions.
Create and manage a strategic plan that makes pitching to investors, applying for funding, and securing capital as easy as 1, 2, 3 (4, 5, and so on). You’ll complete this step with a prioritized plan, all the necessary activities assigned to members of your LIFT Team, and a tracking tool to keep everyone accountable and moving forward.
LIFT is different from other tools because it really helps us non-bank experts to talk to financial experts. We are not finance experts or business people but as a result of LIFT, we have successfully talked to a national development bank based in our city and they are willing to go into financing ventures for the Kennemer-identified areas and farmers as well as include the bank as part of their corporate community development fund. We now realize that in the bigger impact of LIFT, we have our local partners and financing institutions we can work with, and bring them to really go into green investment.
When you finish LIFT you're well on your way to an investable landscape action plan. Putting a finance action plan down on paper helps to keep everyone accountable for the hard work of asking investors for investment.
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