Conservation Music

I am applying because I believe that our cause is very much aligned with what the prize is looking for and the fact that we also share the sentiment of ‘Making Good Famous’. I also believe in not just providing solutions, but employing creative and innovative approaches to tackling our current world challenges. Winning this prize would help us to advance our mission and enable us to scale our impact, the marketing support would help us with visibility and building a strong communications strategy. We would use the funding to strengthen our environmental education programs, expand the team, hire more qualified personnel and help further establish the other four chapters we have in the Southern African region.

Growing up as a child, I remember that most of my learning came about through music. My recollections date back to my childhood, from learning the alphabet in school, to learning about my tradition and culture as an African child through song. Today those songs are still very fresh in my memory. I have no doubts about the power of music and the impact it has on the human brain. I have since learned more about the scientific research that backs this up. As I grew older, I fell more in love with music and pursued it in various ways.  

Years later, after attending a Conservation Music event in my home country, I realized the importance of using music as a tool for positive change. As I realized this, I learned more about various environmental topics and the importance of a healthy planet. Eventually I co-founded Conservation Music Lesotho; an organisation that produces and promotes musical media that educates listeners and viewers in conservation and sustainability, with emphasis on rural developing communities.

My plan is to continue leveraging the catalytic power of music to transform minds, educate and inspire action, as it crosses all boundaries, cultures, and ideas.

We are currently left with 10 years to turn the tide on climate change and biodiversity loss and curtail ongoing humanitarian disaster. Globally, 2.5 billion people depend on climate and natural resources for food and income, yet they are often last to hear about what is expected, and what they can do to adapt to climate change. Southern Africa is already facing historic droughts, floods, cyclones and other natural disasters out of season and out of scale, resulting in migration, xenophobic attacks and human trafficking. Musicians worldwide have been frustrated by their lack of ability to do anything for the people or the planet, facing a lack of continuity, results, and scalability. 

Conservation Music is a grassroots organisation that cultivates the use of music as an educational tool for a healthy planet. We produce educational songs, engaging listeners’ thoughts and emotions with relatable lyrical stories which integrate into workshops and curricula that local Conservation Music youth chapters use to directly engage with and distribute to communities and schools across their countries, on top of the broadcast and online engagement. Our global team acts as an on-the-ground catalyst and a strategic guide to this music-driven network of organisers, activists, and educators.

Typically, music has been used for development in two different ways: to raise money for other organizations involved in a cause, or to raise awareness during a single ticketed event, or a series of such events. We however are focused on continuous impact through music. Our own approach is focused on education and advocacy, reaching students and the public with information, engaging both the grassroots and decision-makers. 

On top of this, our work to date has been geographically focused on the frontlines of climate change (in Southern Africa). Musicians here must engage with the issue at hand, and we are there to help them do so as effectively as possible.

Lastly, whereas music has been used to confront humanitarian issues many times in the past, environmental efforts through music have been much more sporadic. Through our work, we are uniting a musical effort for the Earth across borders, genres, languages, colors, and cultures. We are doing this in a way that is designed to be continuous, accessible, and measurable.

We are having an impact on humanity because we are passionate about people and them living on a healthy planet. We are doing this by breaking down silos and mobilising various partners namely; musicians, private sector corporations, eco-NGOs, activists and the government to unite against environmental challenges. We also co-create solutions with these partners and measure impact through pre/post survey analysis, quantifying artists and communities reached, and online performance metrics which give us a realistic view of how much impact we have.

In order to achieve our planned impact, we intend on up-skilling and increasing our staff, developing a global network of musicians and performing artists to bring the power of music and musical performance to this cause, expanding our local chapter structure throughout eastern and southern Africa, developing an extensive environmental school curriculum and set of classroom resources with educational experts in collaboration with other NGOs and providing our tailor-made tools, handbooks, structures, technology, and existing content to activists, musicians, educators, and members of the public all over Africa and beyond. We believe these steps are effective because at their core are three important pillars; collaboration, capacity building, and structure formation.

We are currently directly serving 2000 individuals which is a mix of students, community members and artists, in one year we are looking to increase the number to 5000 individuals. This will be a total number from all five countries where we have chapters. 

I think it is also important to highlight that our volunteers and team have indirectly served 10,000+ individuals and between 2019 and early 2020 before the pandemic hit, we had approximately 42,000 minimum lives impacted through our edutainment productions, chapter projects, conferences and events we participated in, we are looking to double this number as soon as things get back to normal.

• Unite - to mobilise the global music industry in one cohesive effort to educate, advocate, and activate the public, while strategically connecting the resources of the west to our champions on the frontlines. 

Indicator: Total amount of funding raised and deployed for such and the number of partnerships formed.

• Create - media production, educational curricula, and app development to assist us in scaling as we strive to reach the world with tailored messages designed to lead the way towards a sustainable future for all.

Indicator: Proportion of individuals using our app and engaging with our content.

• Educate - to reach children and youth across underprivileged communities through affordable educational technology. We do not underestimate the power of a child to profoundly reach the hearts and minds of family and community decision makers, and we’ve already partnered with one Ministry of Education. 

Indicator: We will use indicator 4.7.1 of SDG 4 because it's best aligned with this goal.

We plan on achieving these goals through strategic partnerships and effective impact measurement and we'll add timeframes to them to keep ourselves on track.

The barriers we currently face to accomplish our goals in the next year are inability to attract talented individuals, lack of sustained funding and program interruption due to COVID-19 lockdowns. Due to lack of consistent funding we cannot provide competitive compensation to our team and this means we cannot attract the right talent at the moment because of our financial challenges. Our programming and events are threatened, due to COVID-19 restrictions.

We intend to overcome our talent shortage barrier by exploring job sharing, offering benefits and launching an effective internship program that will recruit outstanding students whom we’ll capacitate and retain upon graduation. To address the funding barrier, we are preparing to launch a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign that will help us gain more individual donors and plan to fast-track our corporate partnership initiative for recurring funding. For our last barrier, we plan to launch the educational app which will assist with remote instruction and require less field trips by the team during these uncertain times. 

The Elevate Prize will help us do the groundwork and put the right systems in place for these solutions through its funding and capacity building.

We will leverage the larger platform, audience and brand recognition to create more visibility which can translate into more financial support for our cause aiding us scale our impact and expand our network. We also hope to use this exposure to attract the right talent and expertise we need to grow our organisation. Moreover, because we are looking for more established musicians and celebrities to join or partner with our cause, we believe that the Elevate platform can help us get closer to that goal by connecting us with such or helping us build a strong communications strategy that will speak to our target audience.

We use the localisation approach to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive team. We identify talented youth leaders and empower them with structures, resources, and knowledge to lead their own organisations at the national level. They maintain relationships with local artists and broadcasters, engage communities and schools with solar-powered video screenings and activities like tree planting and waste cleanup, produce and distribute local educational songs and videos, and more. 

Our leadership team is made up of youth from diverse backgrounds and cultures with majority of the chapter leaders being women and our organisational values are centred around DEI. As we grow, we intend to bring in more diversity including all gender profiles and people with disabilities in our leadership team. Furthermore, we plan to achieve this by incorporating effective DEI frameworks in our approach.

We are a team of dynamic and exceptional individuals that have made great strides in the environmental space and this can be proven through some awards and recognitions we have received in light of our contribution to addressing environmental issues. The team’s collective skills include, fundraising, nonprofit management, entrepreneurship, grant writing, project management, filmmaking, music production and creative directing amongst many. 

To date, we’ve recorded with 113 performers across 8 different countries to produce 24 songs and music videos while engaging with over 10,000 individuals on the ground, and reaching thousands on the air and online. Along the way, we’ve charted a top ten hit, empirically quantified our impact, and partnered with the likes of the UN, EU, US Embassy, and the National Geographic Society. 

Post our interventions, we have had a 77% learning ratio and our audiences have collectively recognized 56 solutions and preventative measures. Through collaboration with over 40 artists, rural communities, and everyone in between, plus dozens of other music industry stakeholders, we have reached hundreds of thousands of people across Africa and around the world, and formed strategic partnerships with over 47 organisations and companies in the 38 months that we have been in operation.

For three years, our organisation had worked to fill the environmental education gap in Lesotho, with a special emphasis on climate change, erosion, and other key environmental issues. Upon the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, all programs except COVID-related ones were shut down by government, our target communities’ immediate needs for survival and knowledge about the virus also took precedence. Although our methodologies and networks had typically been leveraged in the context of human-environment interactions, I chose to shift gears during the crisis, applying my skills to being part of the solution to COVID-19 in Lesotho.

My team and I prepared to address the lack of education on COVID-19 by launching an engaging education campaign using some of our methodology, organised a community-based training that was culturally sensitive, and distributed 80 food packages to the most vulnerable households in our area of work. Even though there was a bit of hesitance and concerns that this was mission drift, our beneficiaries' health and well-being took priority and I applied for emergency funding to help them. 

As a servant leader, I decided to pivot instead of caving in during crisis and helped protect some of our most vulnerable beneficiaries. 

UN Solutions Summit

Winning this prize will help us achieve our goals of supporting our youth chapter leaders through capacity building and financial assistance, cover operational and programmatic expenses, develop our educational app, strengthen our monitoring and evaluation processes, and purchase 4 solar cinema kits that will be used for workshops and classroom resources in Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania. It will also enable us to improve our environmental education programs, expand the team, hire more qualified personnel and find suitable working spaces in all the 5 countries. The $300,000 prize will be a cash injection needed to boost our organisation, allowing us to gain stability for a period of 2 years especially given the strength of the dollar over our currencies. This grant will help us achieve our goal of advancing mission and scaling impact in Africa. 

Our current partners include Massive Apparel, National Geographic, Cultures of Resistance Foundation, National University of Lesotho, Greenpop, Malealea Development Trust, Greenpeace Africa and Limomonane Trust. We are working with these partners for our research, programming, networking, and funding purposes. Malealea Development Trust is our close program partner whom we have been working with in the Malealea community, which is where we've piloted our projects since 2017 when our first chapter was launched. In Lesotho we have also partnered with the Ministry of Education and Training through its National Curriculum Development Centre to ensure that our classroom resources are in line with the school curriculum.