Can Nature Conservation Be Financed Like Infrastructure?

No city builds a water treatment plant and then hopes someone will pay to run it. Pipes leak and pumps wear out, so utilities plan for those costs and know who will cover them. The forested hills that feed the plant get no such treatment. Someone has to replant eroded slopes and pay the rangers, yet the bill rarely carries a name. Everyone downstream benefits. Nobody is invoiced.

 

Kenya's new Thamani Asili programme is an attempt to close that gap. Launched on 21 October at Tsavo West National Park, it puts $160 million behind conservation for ten years. Coordinated funding on this scale can do something short grants rarely manage: build the conditions for specific users of nature to pay for it regularly, and for a few of those payments to become strong enough to borrow against. A decade of funding has to leave behind a way to pay for the decades after it.

 

What Kenya's deal changes

 

The programme covers about 17.3 million hectares across 31 counties. Communities would get support to manage about 6 million of those hectares themselves. Donor money will pass through a new independent trust, the Thamani Asili Fund for Kenya.

 

The split of the $160 million deserves more scrutiny than the total. The Nature Conservancy's announcement says the programme is designed to raise $80 million from philanthropy, with the government expected to match it over ten years. Named donors include the Rob Walton Foundation and Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. At the launch, Tourism and Wildlife Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Miano said the government had committed its $80 million. Expected and committed are different words. No annual schedule or budget line has been published, so for now nobody outside the deal can tell which one applies.

 

The model behind the deal, Project Finance for Permanence, takes its name from the way large commercial projects get built. Partners sign off a conservation plan, a costed financial model, government policy commitments and governance rules together, and no pledged money moves until all of it is in place. Funds are then released in stages against milestones. What a PFP leaves out is repayment, since nobody is lending against future cash flows. Its value lies in fixing who owes what, and when, before the work begins.

 

Who pays for the services nature provides?

 

Kenya already has a working example of the beneficiary problem. The Tana River supplies about 95 percent of Nairobi's water, and since 2015 the Upper Tana–Nairobi Water Fund has paid for terracing, riverbank buffers and tree planting upstream so that less soil washes into the reservoirs. Its business case estimated that $10 million spent on this work would return about $21.5 million in benefits over 30 years. East African Breweries, a company that cannot make beer without clean water, is one of its backers. In March 2024 it pledged KSh 60 million to the fund, part of a wider KSh 190 million commitment to Kenya's water towers.

 

All it shows is that a brewer that depends on clean water was willing to contribute. A pledge is not a contract. Nothing public shows the brewer paying a fixed sum each year or against measured results, and the Green Finance Institute's profile of the fund calls such corporate money voluntary. Even its newest partner, the consumer-health company Haleon, signed only a three-year deal in June 2026, for an undisclosed sum.

 

Now picture the next step. Nairobi's water utility and a group of large industrial users agree to pay the fund a set amount each year, perhaps linked to sediment readings at the intake. The fund signs agreements with farmers' groups and community landholders that spell out the work, who holds which rights, how the money is shared and how results are checked. The money then pays for restoration, upkeep and monitoring. The agreements would also need to keep payments flowing through lean budget years and settle who keeps any surplus. Who verifies the sediment readings, and what happens if the results do not improve?

 

Two numbers often get blurred here. One is what a healthy catchment is worth to the brewer, which shows up somewhere in its revenue and profit. The other is what actually reaches the farmers and rangers doing the work. Business cases are written about the first. Conservation runs on the second. A beneficiary belongs in a financing plan only once an arrangement exists to move its money to those people.

 

How long-term funding could support investment

 

Ten years of secure money can do work that one-year grants cannot. It can pay for restoration while the benefits are still years away, and it can keep people in place long enough to agree land-use plans with communities. Thamani Asili's design covers both, with money for community land-use planning and local governance. The same decade could produce the evidence a paying customer would want, such as cleaner intake water or rising wildlife numbers. None of that guarantees a buyer, and no amount of patient funding turns a loss-making activity into a profitable one.

 

The sequence matters: grants fund the work and the agreements, the work generates evidence, and that evidence can support negotiations with future payers. Once payments are steady and tested, a few may be strong enough to borrow against. Until then, the $160 million is public and philanthropic money only, and by the OECD's definition it becomes blended finance only when it draws in additional commercial investment.

 

The Maasai Mara shows what that last step looks like. Around the national reserve, tourism operators lease land from Maasai families and pay them monthly. When the pandemic emptied the camps in 2020, Conservation International and the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association set up a loan fund to cover the lease payments, to be repaid from tourism income and the conservation fees charged to operators once visitors returned. Keeping the two flows distinct is what made the arrangement workable.

 

Carbon is the riskier cousin. TNC lists carbon programmes among the businesses Thamani Asili could support, and the money can be real: northern Kenyan conservancies shared KSh 655 million from carbon sales this year. But a buyer's price is not a conservation budget. Kenya's 2024 carbon market rules require land-based projects on community land to pass at least 40 percent of earnings to the community, and business costs come off before that share is worked out.

 

What commercial revenue cannot cover

 

Infrastructure has never relied on user fees alone. World Bank guidance on public-private partnerships separates projects where users pay, such as a toll road, from those where the government pays an operator to keep a road or hospital available. Making a road toll-free is treated as an ordinary public finance decision. Conservation deserves the same honesty. Much of what healthy land provides, from flood control to the wildlife itself, has no customer who can be billed reliably. Paying for that through the budget, or through long-term philanthropy, is sound design. Treating donor exit as the finish line is a mistake.

 

Commercial revenue also has to be assessed for reliability and governance risk. The Mara showed how fast tourism income can vanish: during the pandemic, landowners accepted half their lease payments for a year, and Germany put in a KSh 660 million grant to cover leases and ranger salaries. Carbon fails differently, and the northern project that paid out this year shows how. In January 2025 a court in Isiolo ruled that two of the Northern Rangelands Trust's largest conservancies had been set up without adequate public participation and were unconstitutional. Verra, which certifies the credits, suspended the project that May and reinstated it in June 2026, but NRT's appeal is still pending and more than 30 herders from Biliqo Bulesa filed a fresh case this month. Carbon income from contested land can disappear with one ruling. Community authority over land and payments therefore belongs inside the financial design from the start.

 

Judge any revenue source by what it reliably adds once costs and obligations are paid, and by whether the land and the people living on it end up better off.

 

What Kenya needs to demonstrate

 

The programme is days old, and its results are years away. What can be demanded now is the information needed to judge them. Which contributions are firmly committed, and when does each one arrive? What does it cost each year to manage these areas properly, and which sources will pay that bill once the ten years are up? Enduring Earth says every PFP builds a financial model meant to fund conservation for the foreseeable future, so Kenya's should already exist. The launch materials publish neither that model nor the policy conditions tied to the money, and both ought to be public.

 

Four tests will show over the decade whether the structure works:

• Continuity: essential conservation work stays properly funded every year, including year eleven.

• Contribution: commercial deals bring in dependable net money where the economics allow, and nobody pretends where they don't.

• Results: wildlife and water improve, and the promised community benefits arrive.

• Consent: communities keep real authority over land and over how payments are shared.

 

The $160 million and the 17.3 million hectares will be quoted for years. Neither proves any of this.

 

Conservation can be financed like infrastructure if the comparison is taken seriously: plan for running costs and name the payers, knowing some of them will be taxpayers. A conservation deal earns its promise of permanence when its first decade of funding leaves a credible way to pay for the next.

 

Sources

• Thamani Asili: The Nature Conservancy, Reuters, Xinhua, The Star

• Upper Tana–Nairobi Water Fund: TNC case study, EABL, Green Finance Institute

• Mara and northern Kenya carbon: Conservation International, Survival International, Carbon Herald, Kenya's carbon market regulations

• Finance models: Enduring Earth, World Bank, OECD