Africa’s Capital Challenge: A Founders' Note on Trust, Alignment, and Locally-Led Impact

A Founders’ Note from Wendy Wakhusama & Tidah Adhiambo

What 2025 Revealed About Philanthropy and Capital in Africa

Across philanthropy in Africa, 2025 revealed a growing disconnect between ambition and execution. Commitments to equity, locally led development, and collaboration continued to rise, yet many funders struggled to translate intent into effective, trusted practice. As global uncertainty increased, questions around capital flow, decision-making, and accountability became more pronounced, highlighting the urgent need for trust-based philanthropy approaches that align funding with proximity, readiness, and long-term impact.

The GEO 2025 findings echoed what many practitioners had already sensed: funders are increasingly aligning with values like equity and power shifting, but translating those values into practice remains a sticking point. The intent exists. The mechanisms still need to evolve.

What stood out to us, however, was how African organisations responded. Instead of waiting for consensus or direction from global institutions, leaders across the continent continued to design, build, and adapt. Communities reorganised. Cross-sector partnerships emerged organically. Local systems found ways to move forward even when larger structures paused.

This year reaffirmed the guiding question behind TJ Africa’s work:

How do we build environments where African organisations help shape not only solutions, but the architecture of capital, collaboration, and power?

Three insights shaped our reflections.

1. Reimagining Capital Flow for African Impact

Traditional funding approaches, often short-term, category-bound, and externally defined, are increasingly mismatched to the scale of Africa’s ambitions. The volatility of 2025 exposed the fragility of these models, especially when they are siloed or overly procedural.

A more effective future requires flexible, blended, and locally anchored financing structures. It means pairing philanthropic capital with catalytic finance, encouraging domestic resource mobilisation, and embracing revenue-generating models where appropriate. It means treating African institutions as co-designers of capital pathways, rather than as endpoints of aid pipelines.

Across the continent, we saw leaders engaging with funders and investors with renewed agency, proposing structures rather than waiting to be slotted into them. This shift is accelerating and reshaping how capital can serve long-term systemic impact. 

2. Trust, Proximity, and Community-Rooted Leadership

One of the clearest patterns of 2025 was that the strongest solutions still come from the people closest to the work, yet these organisations remain underfunded and over-assessed. This is not a question of skill. It is a question of where trust and capital converge.

The longstanding assumption that African institutions need heavy-handed oversight or externally defined pathways is fading, but not quickly enough. The constraints persist in the form of restrictive grants, rigid reporting requirements, and risk frameworks that are often designed far from the realities they aim to influence.

Our work this year, from leadership preparation to institutional strengthening, reinforced a simple truth: when funders centre partnership over procedure, African organisations accelerate. Capacity deepens from within. Solutions become more sustainable because they are grounded in lived experience, not imported templates.

3. Building the Ecosystems Required for Complex Problems

The challenges shaping Africa’s future, climate vulnerability, economic resilience, and demographic shifts, are interconnected by design. Yet, funding often remains fragmented, locked into verticals that do not align with how communities experience problems.

What we saw in 2025 is that integrated, multi-sectoral approaches are gaining traction. Governments, investors, civil society, and local institutions increasingly recognise that progress requires shared accountability frameworks and coordinated action. The continent does not need duplicative initiatives. It needs constructive alignment.

This is where TJ Africa’s role has been most active.

What 2026 Will Require

If 2025 surfaced the tensions in global development, 2026 will demand firmer choices and braver structures.

• Funders will need to convert commitments into investable practices.

• Organisations will need capital that matches their ambitions, not their constraints.

• Africa’s impact ecosystem will need platforms that support collaboration at scale.

Africa’s next chapter won’t be defined by the size of cheques, but by whether funders and proximate leaders can operate in true alignment, and whether trust finally resides with the people closest to the work.

TJ Africa exists to make African-led impact not just visible, but inevitable.

We are grateful for the partners who walked with us through 2025 and energised for the work ahead.

— Wendy & Tidah