Which way to the future?

I've recently had a chance to learn a little about philanthropy on the African continent. In a far-ranging video discussion, thirty African philanthropy professionals talked about their information needs during a session of the African Philanthropy Conference.

Context matters here. First, language matters - the French-speaking participants noted that most useful information is only distributed in English. Media matters - radio is an important information source for many people. Data matter. Participants wanted to be able to query multiple, large datasets quickly and accurately without further exacerbating the extractive work of AI companies.

And, hoarding matters. Perhaps the most pernicious element of the desired information landscape is the degree to which non-Africans take and hoard information from Africans. This is true in terms of data scraped for western AI companies. It's true in terms of NGOs - those outside the continent who collect and use information about Africa for their own fundraising or programmatic purposes and don't share what they have, learn, or know with Africans. It's true in terms of foundations, who require and take information from grantees without ever making it available to them in any useful manner.

There was an important undertone in this discussion. Western resources such as online giving marketplaces and publicly available datasets were desirable. Western philanthropic practices went largely unmentioned. The U.S., UK, and EU have been imposing our philanthropic structures, legal expectations, and norms on African communities for centuries. We've used these systems to extract information and wisdom from local people. Dr. Lebohang Liepollo Pheko points out that this is the history of Africa giving to the North, for it is the African people who have given their wisdom, history, ways of being, and ways of understanding the world. As those of us in the North come face to face with the damage our economies have inflicted globally, many of us are now turning to African practices as signposts toward sustainability. We have a lot of assumptions to shed.

Imagining the future of philanthropy is an ideal opportunity to either reconsider or reclaim our beginnings. What do I mean by this? "Big philanthropy" (AKA foundations) are financial products for the wealthy. Occasionally, the people behind these organizations care about economic inequality, sustainable living, and justice, but for the most part they manage their foundations as financial products, not as social change machinery. Focusing on the rules around foundations or foundation practices is to continue centering the wealthy and their financial products and hope that will lead to different outcomes than in the past.

If we hope to pursue just futures it makes sense to begin with practices and organizational structures that already try for this. This means centering structures such as cooperatives, mutual associations, and peer networks that the North has long relegated as "alternatives." This includes sharing assets (from raw materials to loan pools), community finance, and representative governance - and making them mainstream. It means centering the people who are experts in these practices and learning how to adapt, grow, or expand them. It means acknowledging the direction of giving and receiving - not only of funding but of vision and expertise.

The dialogue was one step in an ongoing effort to reinvent the Blueprint series. We'll pick up on part of this on August 5, in conversation with Bheki Moyo of the Centre on African Philanthropy and Social Investment and Naila Farouky of the Arab Foundations Forum.

You can register here. I hope you'll join us. I have a lot to learn.