What Does Systems Change Mean?
Note: This post was published before our 2025 rebrand. We are now called the African Collaborative.
Kidame Mart, Ethiopia
Systems change work is challenging, especially when going against deeply entrenched discrimination. For many African visionaries, securing and maintaining funding often feels like a winding road riddled with bureaucratic hoops and hurdles fueled by both conscious and unconscious bias.
Over the past three months, the African Visionary Fund has embarked on an ambitious project to create a systems change advocacy strategy that digs deeper into philanthropy’s broken system, with the intention to share our learnings with other funders within and beyond our networks. We have facilitated key stakeholder interviews with our partners, asking leaders to identify the key problems faced by African-led organizations when fundraising, and offer solutions on key interventions that funders can begin to implement now to make funding partnerships more equitable, efficient, and effective.
It has been difficult to hear stories of injustice and ignorance as our partners rehash definitive and disheartening moments in their careers: stories of funders asking leaders to reduce the quality of the services they administer, thus dehumanizing their core community of beneficiaries; and stories of funders denying support because of a mismatch in impact measurement frameworks, only for the organization to play a key role in the expansion of the Sustainable Development Goals’ impact metrics later.
Indeed, African leaders are experts at their work, and should be regarded as invaluable partners in solving some of the foremost challenges faced in unique contexts on the continent. Yet hindrances to the health of funder-doer relationships abound, including:
Mismatches in funders’ grantmaking agenda and the realities on the ground
Issues of doubt and mistrust in the expertise of leaders on the ground
Pressure to scale too fast without contextual understanding, and
Dismissals of organizational needs for long-term sustainability
These are all differences that can be changed and challenges that can be solved with mindset shifts and intentional conversation. If funders were to ask their partners the right questions, there would be more progress towards:
Making the stewardship and application process less cumbersome
Making reporting less unduly monitored, and
Making philanthropy less prescriptive by transforming grantmaking criteria and giving unrestricted funding
Equity is at the heart of all that we do at the Fund, and we work hard to be an example of how trust-based partnership and inclusive decision-making can create a new funding model that shifts the power imbalance over time. The AVFund’s relationship with our partners is of utmost importance to us, and we are constantly building and evolving our portfolio services to reflect that. All of our portfolio and grant services are grounded in our partners’ needs – every interaction, email correspondence, site visit, and grantmaking and reporting mechanism is dictated by what works best for them.
We give unrestricted funding because we believe that the people closest to the issues have a better understanding of how to allocate resources towards the solutions. We give them multi-year grants because the socio-economic issues they are trying to solve on the continent are complex and multi-dimensional, and require proximity and patience to see significant social impact over time. Our partners tell us that this unrestricted and multi-year funding allows them to secure their long-term sustainability and cover the necessary overhead expenses that most funders won’t support. It allows them to innovate and test new solutions that can increase their impact. Everybody wins.
We have also heard our partners express relief that our systems change advocacy strategy is being set in motion, requests for the African Visionary Fund to be even bolder in raising these issues on the global philanthropic agenda, and affirmations that our mission makes a big difference in the way African-founded organizations are funded and treated.
Systems change work is challenging, but it is also tenfold more hopeful. By providing a platform for the most knowledgeable people to share their views, African leaders today and in the future are better enabled to serve and impact their communities. It has illuminated how empowering it is when someone asks the right questions.
