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Since the Covid-19 pandemic, organisations in Southern Africa have been exposed to heightened uncertainty. The region has long dealt with the world's highest rates of HIV and AIDS, unparalleled inequality, high youth unemployment, and the impacts of climate change. Accordingly, Official Development Aid (ODA) has played a crucial role in delivering solutions, including livelihood recovery and diversification strategies, for several decades.
Today, however, non-profits in the sub-region are facing a new and unprecedented burden. A convergence of regulatory restrictions and funding cuts poses a threat to the long-term and short-term sustainability of many non-profit organisations, and community-based philanthropy organisations (also referred to as community foundations) are expected to be significantly impacted.
Funding and legal challenges are now fundamentally reshaping how organisations operate, mobilise resources, and deliver impact across the region. We anticipate that infrastructure organisations, especially those that support community foundations, will have to step up their role in strengthening the broader ecosystem.
The regulatory landscape in the sub-region has become particularly restrictive in recent years, with new laws imposing stringent measures on the registration and compliance of non-profit organisations. These include: The Botswana's Societies Amendment Act of 2022, South Africa's Non-Profit Organisations Amendment Act of 2023, and Zimbabwe's Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act of 2025.
In theory, these laws were enacted to counter money laundering, the financing of terrorism, and to prevent the abuse of charitable giving for political or socially undesirable ends. In effect, they challenge the movement of philanthropic resources to address pressing social crises and have led to sweeping changes in how civil society organisations operate. In addition, while most analyses focus on the closure of USAID alone, similarly dramatic funding cuts have taken place across the globe. France contracted its aid budget by €1 billion in 2024 ($1.2 billion), Germany by €2 billion ($2.3 billion). In the Netherlands, aid is set to be reduced by €8 billion ($9.3 billion) over the next four years.
In sum, eight wealthy countries have cut their external aid by a total of $17 billion, and as a result, regional non-profits working across health, education, governance, and human rights are now facing existential threats. In this landscape, new conversations have had to emerge, asking whether there is scope to nurture local resource mobilisation as a strategy for driving development.
The concept of strengthening philanthropic ecosystems offers a promising response to these multifaceted challenges. While matching the scale of USAID and other ODA funding through domestic resource mobilisation may take some time, at SIVIO Institute, we foresee a future where it could sustain community philanthropy organisations' (CPOs) projects.
Based on this belief, we have been driving an approach that moves beyond individual organisational capacity building since 2022, working to create interconnected networks of funders, individual givers, intermediaries, support organisations, regulatory bodies, and beneficiary communities.
In 2024, we secured resources from WINGs (LiftUpPhilanthropy Fund) to pilot an approach for ecosystems philanthropy in Malawi and Zimbabwe, and, as a Philanthropy Support Organisation (PSO), we collaborated with 23 CPOs to facilitate the formation of two national, bottom-up networks.
These networks play a catalytic role in building and strengthening regional ecosystems and they serve as platforms for collaboration and cross-learning. Crucially, this ecosystem approach also addresses several critical challenges by means of the following methods:
The funding crisis is forcing PSOs to facilitate difficult but necessary conversations. Through the support of SIVIO Institute, community foundation network members in Malawi and Zimbabwe are exploring innovative financing mechanisms, adopting social enterprise models, and building stronger community connections.
The philanthropy ecosystems approach offers a pathway through current challenges by creating more resilient, interconnected, and locally owned development infrastructure.
The established networks of community foundations stand testament to its potential and, rather than merely surviving regulatory restrictions and funding cuts, this approach fosters collaboration among philanthropy actors to drive sustainable development from the ground up. For the approach to succeed more widely, however, we need a mindset shift. From donor dependency to amplification of existing community assets.
These are early days, but we are already seeing a different kind of conversation transforming powerlessness into action. The current crisis is an opportunity for PSOs to support self-sustaining philanthropy cultures that are less dependent on external bodies, and by focusing on strategic, locally driven solutions, Southern Africa can transform these challenges into catalysts for a more resilient, inclusive ecosystem.
Tendai Murisa is the Executive Director of SIVIO Institute, and Shelly Satuku is the Coordinator for SIVIO Institute's Centre for Philanthropy and Communities.