Upcoming Events
The African CSO Ideas Festival
October 6–8, 2026
Over nine months, the African CSO Awards 2026 set out to surface some of the amazing organizations already driving change across the continent and invite them to let their work be witnessed. They are the Doers, Supporters, Enablers, Emerging Leaders, and Lifetime Achievers who show us, without any call for the limelight, what resilient and innovative community-led development looks like.
Next month, we celebrate our (29) final nominees in Nairobi at The African CSO Ideas Festival. Over three days, we will come together in person with these inspiring organizations and several of our peers to share something remarkable – a convening born from African wisdom.
The African CSO Ideas Festival is embodied by the expertise and lived realities of the nominees we celebrate and others like them. The knowledge we need for a stronger African civil society lives inside each, but it rarely gets named, connected, or funded the way it should be.
Three days of ideas, data, honest exchange, as well as restoration and rest. We are grateful to all our funders who make our work, and convenings like this, possible.
Past Events
Africa at the Centre 2026: Leading Change, Shifting Power
September 1-3, 2026
From 1–3 September, Africa at the Centre brought together civil society leaders, funders, and researchers from across the continent and the diaspora in Accra to reimagine development from an African perspective and to place African leadership, knowledge, and agency at the heart of systems change.
For decades, development in Africa has been shaped by externally defined priorities, funding models, and measures of success, often limiting African ownership and weakening local solutions. This convening set out to change that, returning to the questions that decide whose work gets seen and funded: Who sets the agenda? Who holds the resources? Whose knowledge counts? Who decides what success looks like?
EPIC-Africa was proud to take part alongside WACSI, AFFORD, Reos Partners, and Reimagining International NGOs (RINGO). Our contribution reflects the conviction we’ve held from the start: African civil society organizations hold deep, living community knowledge, and the essential work of enabling organizations like ours is to make sure they can be discovered, trusted, and funded by as many donors as want to see African agency lead.