Youth-Led Regenerative Stewardship and Commons Governance in Rural Malawi

ClimateWise Organization

Malawi

Community organisation

NGO

Awareness-raising and communication campaigns

Capacity-building, education and training

Participatory and community engagement processes

Commons stewardship and community governance

Funding opportunities and sustainability strategies

ClimateWise is a youth-led NGO founded in 2021 in Malawi, working at the intersection of land stewardship, community governance, and climate resilience. Our ownership model builds commons-based governance into every project so communities manage their resources after we leave. We form Water Point Committees 60% women that run independently. All 11 remain functional today. Our Farmer Field Schools are peer-learning commons where farmers teach farmers harvests grew from 8 to 35 bags per acre. Our 100 Gender Clubs across six districts. In four years 23,651 people with clean water, 2,470 farmers

We would like to propose a dialogue session on the question: When does outside support strengthen community commons and when does it weaken it? This question sits at the heart of ClimateWise's work. We have seen communities whose water governance collapsed when an NGO left because the NGO never transferred real ownership. We have also seen communities whose capacity grew because an outside organisation invested deeply in local governance before leaving. We believe this tension between external support and genuine community self-determination is one the whole SoilTribes network navigates. We would like to bring our experience from rural Malawi into dialogue with experiences from Mediterranean and other African territories, and explore together what conditions make the difference between dependency and commons resilience.