The Community Paradox: Who does philanthropy serve?

Philanthropy often speaks the language of communities. It promises participation, inclusion, and transformation.

But for many grassroots actors across Africa, the deeper question is no longer whether philanthropy reaches communities, but whether communities are truly shaping the systems that claim to serve them.

That tension sat at the centre of the third session of The Next Architecture of Philanthropy roundtable series, convened by the African Youth Philanthropy Network (AYPN).

Under the theme of “The Community Paradox: Who Does Philanthropy Serve?” youth leaders and grassroots practitioners confronted the widening gap between institutional philanthropy and lived community realities.

The conversation moved beyond the usual language of funding gaps and measures of impact into interrogated power: who controls resources, who defines solutions, and whose voices are treated as credible enough to shape development priorities.

Throughout the discussion, participants repeatedly returned to one central concern: communities continue to be treated as recipients of development rather than as producers of knowledge, systems, and solutions.

Leading the provocation was Tchanlandjou Kpare of Ashoka Africa, who challenged the dominant assumption that philanthropy introduces development into communities that would otherwise remain stagnant.

Drawing from examples across the continent, Kpare pointed to deeply rooted traditions of solidarity and collective organising that long predate formal philanthropic systems.

“We have our own models of solidarity and accountability,” Kpare said during the discussion.

“Unfortunately, there is a dominant philanthropy system that does not recognize it. That’s the truth. It treats African giving as something that needs to be encouraged or incubated. But it already exists.”

He referenced community structures in Senegal where young people voluntarily gather during harvesting seasons to support collective farming initiatives whose proceeds later fund schools, hospitals, and road construction.

“These young people are giving their time, their money, their energy to harvest that farm,” he said.

“And what has been harvested will be sold to build schools, hospitals, roads doing the things that governments are supposed to do. So these are concrete things already happening on the ground.”

For Kpare, the issue is not the absence of community action, but the failure of institutional philanthropy to recognise and build from the systems communities have already established for themselves.

“The point now is how can we make it broader, more understood, and more valued,” he added.

“Because philanthropy actors already exist in their own right, with their own traditions of giving.”

That perspective became one of the defining threads of the discussion: communities are not empty spaces waiting to be filled with solutions from outside.

The Fear of Challenging Donors

As the conversation deepened, attention shifted toward the unequal power relations that shape interactions between grassroots organisations and donors.

Marian Murunga, Executive Director of Jenga Afrihub, reflected on how funding dependency often limits the ability of organisations to openly challenge donor priorities, even when communities themselves are asking for different approaches.

“For a very long time, there’s been a heavy reliance on donors for funding,” Murunga said.

“You find that it becomes very difficult for organisations to critique or say what is not going well before a donor, because then you start thinking, what if that funding stops? What if that donor decides not to fund us for subsequent years?”

Murunga described the situation not simply as a funding issue, but as a deeper culture that many organisations have internalised over time.

“There’s a lot of unlearning to do,” she continued.

“We need to get to a point where we have the power and urgency to speak to donors constructively and positively while reminding them that we are representing communities. We are not speaking for ourselves.”

Her intervention highlighted how accountability within philanthropy often flows unevenly.

Communities and local organisations are expected to account for impact and delivery, while donors themselves are rarely challenged on whether their structures genuinely reflect community realities.

Murunga argued that real change requires communities to move from symbolic participation into decision-making itself.

“There’s so much power in centering community needs and realities,” she said.

“If communities are meaningfully involved throughout the process  from designing programs all the way to monitoring and evaluation, then the impact becomes something they own.”

That idea of ownership surfaced repeatedly throughout the discussion, particularly around sustainability.

“We are co-partners in development,” Murunga added later in the session.

“Not just receivers. We want to work with funders in defining the parameters of funding so we can maximize what we have and create sustainable impact.”

On Storytelling 

Another recurring theme during the webinar was storytelling both as a tool for advocacy and as a reflection of the pressures organisations face within donor-driven ecosystems.

Participants acknowledged that storytelling has become central to visibility, fundraising, and legitimacy within the development sector.

But several speakers questioned whether storytelling is sometimes shaped more by funder expectations than by community realities themselves.

Kpare warned against reducing storytelling into a branding exercise designed primarily to attract funding.

“There is a statement that says you need to be visible to be fundable,” he said.

“But we should not fall into that trap because sometimes we focus so much on storytelling to attract funders that we become distracted from actually serving the community.”

He pointed to organisations that project powerful public narratives despite weak realities on the ground.

“We have seen organisations presenting themselves as doing amazing work,” Kpare said. “But when you look behind the scenes, there is nothing there. So maybe we need to rethink storytelling itself.”

Instead of organisations solely controlling narratives about their impact, he proposed more independent approaches to documenting community work.

“Why not involve external partners or independent evaluators to do some of the storytelling instead of us constantly selling our own stories?” he asked.

“Because we are trying to build a different generation of philanthropy.”

At the same time, speakers also reflected on storytelling’s power when communities themselves become the narrators of their own experiences.

Relebohile Lefojane of Southern Africa Youth Forum spoke about advocacy work around youth with albinism, explaining how personal narratives had been used to influence conversations around policy and protection.

“When we use storytelling with a targeted outcome, for example, influencing policy around the killings of youth with albinism, then storytelling becomes more than just telling stories,” Lefojane said.

“It becomes something that can hold decision-makers accountable.”

The discussion repeatedly returned to the idea that storytelling is most powerful when it centers lived realities rather than institutional branding.

On Partnership

As the session moved toward its closing reflections, participants were asked what they would say if seated across from some of the world’s largest philanthropic institutions.

The responses revealed a shared frustration with top-down development models and a collective call for philanthropy to rethink how it relates to communities.

Hawusatu Amidu, a volunteer with CorpsAfrica, argued that many donors continue approaching communities as if development begins with external intervention.

“These communities are not empty,” Amidu said.

“They already have the resources and capacity to lead their own development. They already have solutions to their own problems. What they need is support and partnership.”

She stressed that sustainability becomes impossible when projects are designed externally and imposed onto communities.

“When funders come with predefined ways of working, you may return later and find no sign of sustainability,” she said.

“But when communities are treated as partners, then initiatives can continue beyond the funding cycle.”

Kpare echoed similar concerns while challenging philanthropy to move beyond repeating the same approaches.

“We have been doing the same thing for a long time now,” he said.

“We have seen the successes, the failures, and the learnings. So the question is whether we can truly do better within the existing system.”

Across the discussion, participants were not rejecting philanthropy itself. Instead, they were questioning an architecture that still positions communities at the edge of decision-making while expecting them to remain at the centre of implementation.

By the end of the session, one message had become unmistakably clear: communities are no longer asking simply to be included in philanthropy.

They are demanding to help define what philanthropy becomes.

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