New report on African community foundations and their "different kind of wealth"
19 Oct 2012
Africa is rising. As it looks to its own economic growth, driven by its own resources, the question is no longer how to prevent the continent from sinking further into poverty, but rather how its wealth can be shared more equitably.
It is within this context that a new discourse around African philanthropy is developing. This is framed both by the need to shrug off a culture of aid dependency and the emergence of a new set of African philanthropic institutions.
Some of these new institutions are seeded with money from outside the continent while others are entirely home‑grown, but all seeking to draw on local resources and tap into different forms of wealth, which include cash but also include other, less tangible, forms of social capital such as trust and credibility. These organizations seek to occupy the spaces between large, formal philanthropy and more local level mobilization of communities and their assets, and to build bridges between the two. At the same time they also promote a form of development which is community‑led and community‑owned.
This report focuses on this group of institutions. They include community foundations, other types of community philanthropy institutions and local foundations – all operating in different parts of the African continent. The group is small but growing rapidly and has importance beyond its size. This report lays a baseline for the field and, although our data is incomplete, we see it as the beginning of an important story which interweaves different narratives from the sphere of international development and from Africa’s own rich traditions of giving and social solidarity.
We invite your feedback, thoughts and comments.
Jenny Hodgson and Barry Knight