When aid shrinks, communities rise

(L – R): Samuel Kimeu and Mary Kasiva, Africa’s Voices

Across the world, the development landscape is shifting. Aid budgets are tightening, priorities are changing, and long-standing funding pipelines that many systems relied on are becoming less predictable. For governments, civil society organizations and communities alike, this moment is prompting an uncomfortable but necessary reflection: what happens when external aid becomes uncertain?

The answer for communities across Africa may not lie in waiting for new funding streams to emerge. Instead, it lies in rediscovering something that has always existed: the power of communities to support themselves and each other.

Long before modern development frameworks were introduced, African societies organized around shared responsibility and collective care. Communities pooled labour to cultivate land, mobilized resources to support families in distress, and worked together to build schools, water points, and communal infrastructure.

In Kenya, this spirit of collective action has deep historical roots. In many communities, families and local leaders contributed a range of resources to help establish schools for their children. During the early decades after independence, this community-driven effort became widely known through the harambee movement, which mobilized citizens to build educational institutions where government provision was limited. By the late 1970s, thousands of primary and secondary schools across Kenya had been established through these community self-help initiatives, reflecting a powerful national culture of collective investment in education.

These schools were often built through community initiatives where residents contributed money, land, materials, skills and labour, while local committees oversaw construction and school management. In many ways, the story of Kenya’s education system is also a story of community philanthropy and agency. To a lesser extent, this feat in the education sector was replicated in the health sector with the construction of dispensaries across many communities. There is an African proverb that captures this wisdom succinctly: one finger cannot lift a pot. The message is simple but profound: lasting solutions emerge when people come together.

This is an excerpt of a blog. To read the piece in its entirety, head to the #ShiftThePower Treehouse.

By: Samuel Kimeu, Executive Director and Mary Kasiva, Research Officer at Africa’s Voices.