Locally Led Collaborative Philanthropy

Collaborative funding models are increasingly framed as vehicles for localization and power-shifting in philanthropy and development. Yet the language of trust-based, African-led collaboration has outpaced the infrastructure needed to make it real. Many collaboratives move money differently without changing who holds decision-making power, who bears risk, or who is accountable to whom — reproducing the same intermediary dynamics they were built to replace.
This session explores what it means to design collaborative funding models without capture.
Participants will work through:
What distinguishes a collaborative that redistributes decision-making power from one that redistributes only funding flows
What governance and accountability have to be true — structurally — for shared decision-making to hold under pressure
Where existing African-led collaboratives have built real enforcement or feedback mechanisms, and where the absence of one has quietly reintroduced old dynamics
The session will draw on SFP’s ongoing work on lack of accountability infrastructures as a central structural problem in the social sector, alongside the researchers and practitioners on collaborative funding in the room — aiming to leave participants with a working set of conditions for evaluating any collaborative model they’re part of, rather than a general endorsement of the collaborative approach itself.