What if the Baobab Holds the Answer? Rethinking the Future of Funding in East and Southern Africa
By Abel Whande
Last weekend, while travelling along the Masvingo–Mutare Road, I stopped beneath a solitary baobab tree.
Like many people who grew up in Southern Africa, I have always admired baobabs without really thinking about them. They seem almost impossible. Their trunks are enormous. Their branches look as though they were planted upside down. They survive droughts that kill other vegetation. Some have stood for centuries, witnessing kingdoms rise and fall, economies boom and collapse, and generations come and go.
As I stood there, looking at this giant tree in the middle of a dry landscape, I found myself thinking about funding.
Not because the baobab has anything directly to do with donor conferences, proposal writing, or shrinking aid budgets. But because lately it feels as though everyone working in humanitarian and development sectors across East and Southern Africa is asking the same question:
How do we continue delivering impact when traditional funding is becoming increasingly uncertain?
Whether in Juba, Harare, Lilongwe, Maputo, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, or Kampala, the conversation is remarkably similar.
Needs continue to grow. Climate shocks are becoming more frequent. Conflicts remain unresolved. Economic pressures are intensifying.
Yet, funding pools are shrinking.
Every strategic meeting eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable reality. We are trying to solve twenty-first-century problems with a funding architecture largely designed for a different era.
The question is no longer how to raise more money. The question is whether we are looking for money in the wrong places altogether.
During my years working across Southern Africa and later serving as Country Director in South Sudan, I witnessed both the power and the limitations of traditional aid financing. International support saved lives, strengthened systems, and enabled organisations like ours to reach communities in times of crisis. Yet, I also saw how quickly progress could be threatened when priorities shifted, donor budgets contracted, or global events redirected attention elsewhere. Those experiences have increasingly led me to ask whether the future of funding in Africa requires a different way of thinking.
The Mirage of the Next Donor
For years, many organisations have approached funding like thirsty travellers crossing a desert. The assumption has been that there is another water source ahead. Another donor. Another grant. Another funding call.
When one donor reduces support, we look for another. When priorities shift, we adjust our position. When budgets shrink, we write more proposals.
This strategy worked reasonably well when international aid budgets were expanding. But today it feels increasingly like a game of musical chairs. More organisations are chasing fewer opportunities. Competition has intensified. Transaction costs have increased.
And perhaps most importantly, the system has become heavily dependent on a relatively small number of external actors making decisions thousands of kilometres away from the communities experiencing the challenges.
The problem is not simply that funding is declining. The problem is concentration. When too much of a system depends on too few sources, vulnerability becomes inevitable.
Nature understood this long before we did.
The Baobab’s Secret
The remarkable thing about a baobab is not merely that it survives drought. It is how it survives.
Unlike many trees, a baobab stores vast quantities of water during good seasons. It creates reserves during periods of abundance, allowing it to withstand periods of scarcity. Its resilience does not come from constantly searching for new water. It comes from building systems that allow it to retain and manage resources over time.
Perhaps this is where the future of funding in East and Southern Africa begins. Not with finding the next donor. But with creating mechanisms that allow more resources to be generated, retained, and recycled within the region itself.
Beyond Aid: The Rise of Regional Capital
For decades, development conversations have often separated aid from investment. One was viewed as charitable. The other as commercial.
But increasingly, the boundary between the two is becoming blurred.
Across Africa, we are witnessing the growth of sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, impact investors, diaspora investments, family offices, corporate foundations, and regional philanthropic networks. Collectively, these pools of capital represent billions of dollars. Yet humanitarian and development actors often remain disconnected from them.
Many organisations still spend most of their energy cultivating relationships in Washington, Brussels, London, Stockholm, Ottawa, and Geneva. Far less time is spent engaging Johannesburg, Nairobi, Kigali, Lagos, Cape Town, Addis Ababa, or Harare.
This may be one of the greatest missed opportunities of our generation.
The future of funding may not be overseas. It may be next door.
The Untapped Power of African Philanthropy
One of the most persistent myths in development is that philanthropy is weak in Africa. The reality is quite different. African communities have always practised giving. From burial societies and village savings groups to church networks and family remittances, mutual support is deeply embedded within social structures.
The challenge is not generosity. The challenge is aggregation. Millions of small contributions remain fragmented.
What if technology allowed them to become coordinated? What if African philanthropy could operate at continental scale? What if local giving was not viewed as a supplement to aid but as a strategic funding pillar in its own right?
The game changer may not be a billion-dollar donor. It may be millions of citizens contributing in ways that are currently invisible to formal systems.
Localisation Requires Local Money
For years, the humanitarian sector has spoken about localisation. We have discussed shifting power closer to communities. We have invested in local partnerships. We have developed localisation strategies. Yet, there is an uncomfortable contradiction. Power follows money.
As long as the majority of resources originate elsewhere, decision-making will inevitably remain influenced by those controlling the funding. True localisation may therefore be less about structures and more about financing. The organisations that will thrive in the next decade may not be those with the strongest proposal-writing teams.
They may be those capable of building diverse ecosystems of support that include communities, businesses, philanthropists, investors, governments, and international donors.
Diversity creates resilience. Monocultures rarely survive shocks.
Learning from Mobile Money
Perhaps the most important lesson comes from an entirely different sector.
Twenty years ago, few people predicted that East Africa would become a global leader in digital financial inclusion. Yet mobile money transformed how millions of people save, spend, transfer, and access financial services. The innovation succeeded because it solved a local problem rather than importing a foreign solution.
Maybe funding innovation requires the same mindset. Instead of asking how Africa can adapt to existing funding models, perhaps we should ask how funding models can adapt to Africa.
What would humanitarian financing look like if it were designed from scratch in Nairobi rather than New York? In Harare rather than Geneva? In Juba rather than Brussels?
The answers might surprise us.
The Ecosystem Shift
I do not think there will be a single game changer. There is unlikely to be a magical funding mechanism that suddenly replaces declining aid budgets. What I think we are witnessing is something bigger. An ecosystem shift.
The organisations that prosper will not necessarily be the largest. They will be the most adaptable. The most connected. The most trusted. The most capable of building relationships across sectors that historically never spoke to each other – governments, businesses, communities, philanthropists, investors, diaspora networks, faith-based organisations, technology companies, and research institutions.
The future may belong to those who learn to connect these worlds.
Much like the baobab, resilience will come not from constantly searching for new rain, but from building systems capable of storing value, sharing resources, and surviving long dry seasons.
The funding landscape in East and Southern Africa is changing. That much is certain. What remains uncertain is whether we will continue chasing water in the distance or begin building our own reservoirs.
The baobab made its choice centuries ago. Perhaps it is time we made ours.
The future of funding in Africa may not depend on finding more resources, but on unlocking the resources that have been around us all along.
(Abel Whande is a strategic leadership expert, humanitarian and development leader, and former Country Director of CARE in South Sudan)
