Wisdom for our Future Fund

Note: This post was published before our 2025 rebrand. We are now called African Collaborative.

Msichana Initiative, Tanzania

The lessons we have learned from our three-year, $10M+ fund journey

Over the last three years, the African Visionary Fund has sown the seeds necessary to catalyze widespread systemic change in how funders view and fund visionary African-founded and led organizations. We are beginning to see the direct effects of our sector-agnostic funding and our portfolio services work on the trajectories of our partners. But the work of empowering African-founded and led organizations to thrive and serve their communities on their own terms is far from being done. 

Our next fund will be dedicated to continuing our mission and realizing our vision on a larger scale. Throughout our process of internal organizational reflection and gathering feedback and insights, we have learned key lessons that we are taking into the strategic planning process for our Future Fund. 

Sustainable development is localized development. 

Our founding values remain unchanged: we believe that locally-rooted social change organizations are invaluable innovators of groundbreaking solutions that best serve their communities because they possess the crucial inputs needed for deep impact—knowledge, context, and proximity. We define a localized organization as one that is geographically located in an African community or region; the leadership team and Board of Directors mostly identify as belonging to the community or region that they serve; true decision-making power is in the hands of locally-rooted leaders and board members; and community engagement and participation is an integral part of the operating model. 

Our next fund will continue to be committed to funding African-led, locally-rooted and community-centered organizations in multiple development and social impact sectors.

The funding desert is much wider and drier than we originally thought. 

As a sector-agnostic funder, the AVFund has a unique privilege to see and understand African development’s landscape holistically. Many—if not most—Sub-Saharan African countries have robust and active local nonprofit sectors. Advocacy, development, and human rights organizations have emerged across the continent over decades in direct response to an increasing need for service provisions where government programs fall short. 

Yet when analyzing our pipeline, many of the 800+ organizations who have applied for funding have little to no institutional support, and rely heavily on grassroots funding. The funding drought that we aim to address, that African founded and led organizations chronically face, is more severe than we imagined. 

Our next fund will be structured to be inclusive of more diverse African-led organizations—especially those that are left behind. 

Wezesha Impact, Uganda

Budgets don’t indicate an organization's capacity or impact.

The funding journey of most African-founded and led organizations is one riddled with budget-related anxiety, no matter their budget size, visibility, width of reach or depth of impact. Many high-impact, low visibility organizations struggle to attract the attention of funders, and have smaller budgets than even we made space for in our initial eligibility criteria. Many high-impact, highly visible organizations are stuck in a cycle of growing their budget and programming, being considered “too big” for further funding, and then not being able to maintain a sustainable annual budget. They all continue to run transformative programs regardless. 

Our next fund’s eligibility criteria will be more inclusive of organizations that have budgets of various sizes. We will create a grantmaking structure that meets organizations where they are, and supports them in their journeys based on their self-identified growth goals. 

Funders say they are ready to change—but less inclined to act swiftly to change their ways. 

There is a noticeable trend emerging where international development agencies are making changes towards localization, but continue to entrench the status quo of implementing top-down, project-based, funder-imposed intervention models. These occurrences undermine the  purpose of localized development, which is for communities to have greater power and agency over their own development. 

Our next fund will see an elevation of our systems change advocacy efforts, with a multi-pronged approach that influences funders to make effective and equity-centered changes in both who and how they fund in Africa.