Advocacy

Beyond driving unrestricted resources to proximate African-led organizations to accelerate their impact, the African Visionary Fund’s secondary mission is to advocate for systemic change in the global development and philanthropy community. As with all parts of our work, our advocacy work centers our portfolio partners’ experiences, challenges, and successes to unearth key insights and ideate trust-based investment interventions that make funding partnerships more equitable, efficient, and impactful. Our aim is to share our learnings with other funders within and beyond our networks. We want to see significant shifts in the funding trends for community-based African organizations, and big shifts in how African leaders are viewed by funders in the West; innovative, capable, powerful, and critical actors in the philanthropic system. We are deeply engrossed in the work of identifying sector-wide challenges that can be solved with intentional conversation, mindset shifts, and measured action over time:

RETHINKING

Funding and Trust: African social innovation leaders face multiple visible, invisible, and hidden challenges when fundraising due to a lack of trust in their relationships with funders. How might more funders adopt trust-based philanthropy principles in decision-making?

Capacity Development: When capacity development frameworks are designed as part of a funder’s program design, it is often done with a focus on deficit diagnoses rooted in unconscious bias rather than clinical analysis. How might funders alleviate prescriptive and context-deficient capacity development?

Processes: Grant application processes are typically overly burdensome and time consuming, and frustrations arise when funders aren’t transparent during the relationship cultivation and decision-making process. How might funders design more efficient and equitable grantmaking and decision-making processes?

Scale: The pressure to scale programs from funding partners can come at the detriment of impact on the ground, yet organizations feel pressured to grow fast in order to attract more resources. How might funders ease the pressure toscale to attract and keep funding?

ADVOCACY HIGHLIGHTS

In April 2022, African Visionary Fund hosted an Ecosystem Event at the Skoll World Forum, Redefining Scale: A Smarter Way to Scale for Greater Impact in Africa, which culminated in a Skoll.org featured article, How Traditional Philanthropy’s Obsession With Scale Too Often Excludes African Innovators.

Looking ahead to 2023: African Visionary Fund has been chosen as the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA)’s Lead Learning Partner for their work in Charting A Path Forward at the Intersection of Equity and Innovation. Through our partnership with IDIA, we will be closely engaged with some of the world’s largest and most influential funders as they grapple with how to improve, implement and measure equity-centered practices in the way that they fund local social innovation.

We are honored to be able to advance our advocacy agenda on these platforms and connect with our peers across the philanthropy and development ecosystem. Although wide-scale systemic change that deals primarily with mindset shifts and interpersonal relationships is difficult to quantify, we believe that any shifts in funding trends that do occur as a result of our work will have far-reaching implications on the field as a whole in the years to come.