Fahamu is a pan-African social justice organization. We work to support the movement for social justice in Africa. We do that in four ways. The first is through knowledge generation and research. The second is through learning and capacity building. The third is through providing platforms for Africa–centered advocacy. The last is platforms for communication, debate and analysis through Pambazuka News and Press.
How do you define African philanthropy?
African philanthropy needs to be defined at various levels. There’s the philanthropy of day-to-day people supporting one another, helping one another, usually at the family or community level. Then there’s the philanthropy that we’re very good at in terms of whole communities coming to support an individual for their education, that type of support, that hopefully builds up the whole community and the philanthropy has been exercised through the extended family and the community. Then there’s also of course the philanthropy of, say, the middle classes in terms of giving to causes or to organizations. And then of course there’s the African grantmakers and donors.
How can we mobilize more resources for African social justice philanthropy?
At the moment, African philanthropy is really stuck in either giving to individuals within the communities or to the communities from which you come, be it through Diaspora remittances and others. But also through the type of giving that supports what I would call short-term fixes, development activities such as building up a school or hospital, very supposedly low-risk investments. I think what we need to do is galvanize potential African philanthropists towards understanding the causes more broadly so that they’re not looking for the silver bullet that’s going to fix all and the one project they can fund and then go home because it has their plaque with their names on it but really thinking about causes, the dynamics of oppression and power, and creating a greater awareness and understanding of how we might challenge those in a broader sense and more long-term sense and therefore their own feeling of ownership and of being part of a change-making process.
What are your expectations for this conference?
I think this conference has been really interesting in terms of thinking about more self-determined African institutions and what African grantmakers can do to not simply be middlemen to western philanthropists but really be agents of the change that they want to see — and what their role is in movement building in Africa. So it’s been really interesting in those terms. I think we’ve seen lots of different ideas, some opposing but a lot of them towards the same sense. What will be important of course is what comes out, the follow up. I think it’s very good that African grantmakers are coming together on a common platform to talk about things together. It will also be interesting to see what becomes the role of international organizations and international donors within the African Grantmakers Network and whether we want them to stay out or not.
