Everyday Giving Is Not Small Change: Why Africa’s Most Overlooked “Development Finance” Deserves a Seat at the Table
By Rose Maruru
When international grants stall or disappear overnight, what keeps African civil society alive?
The answer isn’t a backup credit line or a sudden influx of bilateral aid. It is the steady, quiet stream of everyday giving from local communities. These millions of micro-transactions, small donations, and communal safety nets are the true bedrock of local resilience.
Yet, in high-level discussions about global development, this capital is almost entirely invisible. We routinely categorize everyday giving as “informal” or purely “charitable”.
It is time to change our vocabulary. Everyday giving is not small change. It is development infrastructure.
Reflections from the Field: The View from Paris
Earlier this year, I joined philanthropists, development finance institutions, and policymakers at the OECD netFWD Annual Meeting in Paris. The core question on the table was urgent: how can philanthropy step up to finance development as public funding shrinks?
As the room debated complex capital structures and evidence-based decision-making, I was struck by a glaring omission. The entire conversation bypassed the primary source of funding already sustaining millions of lives across the African continent. We are consistently looking at the development landscape through the wrong end of the telescope—focusing on external flows while ignoring the robust domestic resource mobilization happening right under our noses.
What We Measure Shapes What We Value
This neglect in global policy rooms stems from a basic paradox: what is not measured is undervalued. Because everyday giving largely operates outside formal tracking systems, it is treated as a footnote rather than a legitimate component of development finance.
We got our first real glimpse of the true scale of this ecosystem when EPIC-Africa analyzed data from 838 civil society organizations across the continent for our Challenging the Myths report. The data shattered long-held assumptions about dependency: 65% of surveyed CSOs identified individuals, communities, and personal networks among their top funding sources.
This local giving takes many culturally embedded forms—from Ghana’s Nnoboa (“you help me, I help you”) and Uganda’s Bulungi Bwansi (“for the good of the community” ) to structured mutual aid and religious tithing. But far from being merely cultural, it performs a highly technical function: it fills market gaps, funds local clinics and schools, and bridges the dry spells between international grant cycles.
To build on this foundation, we have to move past generalizations. That is why EPIC-Africa is currently conducting new, targeted research into the who, what, and why of everyday giving in Africa. We want to map the precise behaviors, motivations, and pathways of African donors. This builds on a momentum we are seeing globally; indeed, we were delighted when the prestigious Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy cited EPIC-Africa’s insights in their Global Philanthropy Indices.
The Hidden Infrastructure Bottle-Neck
At the OECD meeting, a panelist asked me:
“If you could invest in just one thing to unlock African philanthropy right now, what would it be?”
My answer was immediate: Ecosystem infrastructure.
The willingness to give is already there. The friction lies in the systems. Too often, the simple act of sending money across borders or even within countries is incredibly difficult.
I experienced this firsthand recently when trying to make a modest online donation to a community campaign in another African country. My card was repeatedly blocked by payment gateways. The only alternative was an international wire transfer that would have cost more in bank fees than the donation itself. When it is easier to buy mobile airtime than to support a local community initiative, we do not have a generosity problem — we have an infrastructure problem.
True investment in everyday giving means funding:
- Frictionless Digital Payments: Interoperable, low-fee platforms that make micro-donations seamless.
- Local Intermediaries: Trusted community funds that can aggregate and deploy micro-capital efficiently.
- Data & Verification: Systems that give local donors transparency and proof of impact, building long-term trust.
A Strategy for Hard Times
The urgency of this shift cannot be overstated. We are navigating an incredibly volatile funding environment.
In 2025, the sudden disruption of major international funding streams sent shockwaves through African civil society. Our From Fragility to Fortitude study documented the fallout: hundreds of organizations were forced to downsize, freeze programs, or lay off staff.
This crisis was a stark reminder that overdependence on any single external source of capital is an existential threat. True organizational resilience requires a diversified portfolio.
Everyday giving cannot replace large-scale international grants, nor should it be expected to. But it provides something external funders rarely can: legitimacy, flexibility, and local ownership. When a CSO is supported by its own community, its agenda is anchored by the people it serves, not the shifting priorities of a foreign boardroom.
What Happens Next?
If we accept that everyday giving is development finance, we must act like it is:
- For Global Funders: Stop funding only isolated projects. Start investing in the underlying digital, legal, and trust infrastructure that allows local giving to scale.
- For Policymakers: Recognize everyday giving as a core pillar of domestic resource mobilization and design regulatory frameworks that encourage, rather than penalize, local philanthropic flows.
- For African CSOs: Stop viewing local individual giving as a secondary, “nice-to-have” fallback. Treat it as a primary strategic asset for long-term sustainability.
The future of African development will not be designed entirely in international conference halls. It is already being built, coin by coin, through millions of daily acts of local solidarity. Our job is to build the pipelines that let that generosity flow without obstruction.
