Last year, global platforms were buzzing with a real sense of optimism for the future funding of the African continent’s development programs in the wake of global funding cuts.
People were openly calling the cuts to USAID both a wake-up call and an opportunity to fundamentally re-draw the funding relationships which left Africa dependent on the Global North for so long.
The levels of energy and optimism have not abated. In the six months since then, and the year since global funding cuts started to transform the development sector, conversations about realizing a blueprint in which Africa takes control of its own development agenda have both deepened and gained traction more widely.
None of this is without a sense of realism or a sense of the impact that cessation of funding has had across our continent. There are many mountains to climb but there is also a growing body of evidence to help anchor and direct our efforts.
EPIC-Africa’s report, “From Fragility to Fortitude,” charts the impact of U.S. government funding cuts, revealing that, amongst its 364 survey responses from African civil society organizations across 42 countries, almost two thirds believe that funding cuts threaten their long-term survival.
The Evidence Base
But the report looks to the future, too, and that is where it so inspiring. Asking respondents to reimagine the architecture of future African civil society financing, it highlights the need for reform and action in four key areas:
- Capital: from project-driven grants to flexible, core funding
- System: from siloed interventions to ecosystem infrastructure
- Partnership:from compliance to co-creation
- Innovation: from donor-led pilots to African-designed solutions
As the report says, these strategic pillars are not new, but they are a timely re-statement of the direction of travel we must now take and underpin the report’s conclusion that, while philanthropy alone cannot replace government aid, it can bolster organizations on the frontlines and catalyze and underwrite that blueprint.
Findings like these are just part of the growing library of evidence to create a blueprint for philanthropy in Africa, and help practitioners steer away from over-reliance on too few funders.
Firelight, a strategic partner of EPIC-Africa under this project, unveiled its own study, “CBO Resilience”, taking a broader look at the whole issue of civil society resilience. Visiting communities at work in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia, it shows the breadth and depth of crises faced, including environmental crises, political instability, economic hardships, and health emergencies.
Community-Based Organizations in the Lead
The real learning of Firelight’s report, though, lies in what it says about how communities and community-based organizations are answering these crises, and the power they are realizing through three vital frameworks that underpin their resilience-building efforts: social capital, local knowledge, and effective governance and leadership.
Social capital — strong networks and trust — are key to building proactive and responsive resilience and to developing community plans that address the unexpected.
Deeply rooted local knowledge and indigenous practices play a critical role, too, complementing modern strategies and the strengths of social capital to help communities develop context-specific solutions and thrive amid adversity. In Kenya, for example, focus groups taking part in the “CBO Resilience” study highlighted the importance of traditional methods of water harvesting and drought resistant farming as ways through which community-based organizations draw on local knowledge in addressing economic and environmental problems.
Beyond realizing the value of social capital and local knowledge, community-based organizations are building resilience through effective governance and leadership and are able to adapt to challenges because they apply transparent decision-making processes.
These ways of working give community-based organizations unique agency.
In Kenya, they endowed organizations with the flexibility they needed to sustain vital services during the pandemic. In Tanzania, they enable them to promote climate-smart agriculture. In Zambia, the ability to leverage traditional knowledge is helping communities adapt to climate change, while in Malawi farmers are drawing on both traditional and modern methods to cope with climate variability, and the ability to unlock social capital played a key role in managing another emergency.
Inherently African Philanthropy
Communities across African countries continue to suffer on a huge scale, but the lessons they have shown us over the last year can be the bedrock for a future which brings new strength and resilience to even the most vulnerable populations — and this is important.
As Firelight’s own chair, Bongi Mkhabela, has said, our vision is for a philanthropy that is inherently African: rooted in values, self-determination, and collective growth — but the change we seek must go beyond Africa taking control of its own destiny and diversifying its funding sources to bring more domestic funders — private and public sector — into the mix.
It must be about communities taking control, too, because, in a world of shrinking resources, only community-driven solutions and systems change will deliver the best possible impacts for the investments that we manage to attract from within the continent.
As we step further on our journey, these lessons about realizing social capital, promoting local accountability, and championing good governance will provide an invaluable guide for all of us — from those helping communities deliver change on the ground to the funders in the U.S. and across the Global North whose support remains key to our blueprint ambitions.
Marième Daff is executive director at Firelight.
