LFI: Due diligence and a practice of decolonial funding
Decolonial praxis is about sowing resources in ways that allow the roots of dignity, sovereignty, and collective flourishing to deepen. It stands against the continual uprooting of community change through inconsistent funding, short-term interventions, and dependency-producing models of support. This is not about entitlement or waiting for a saviour; rather, it is about recognising how philanthropy has often imposed precisely that posture on communities through fragmented, inconsequential project funding detached from broader social realities.
A decolonial approach requires institutions to understand the places and people they exist alongside and claim to serve, and to situate their work within the historical, political, and economic conditions shaping those communities. It asks philanthropy to confront an uncomfortable truth: too often, what is called “support” becomes a quiet induction into institutional obedience. Become legible to us on our terms or be excluded.
In grounding our decolonial praxis, we have undertaken office visits to identified potential partners to gain that very understanding and begin building relationships of humility and trust. Our site visits are therefore not acts of inspection masquerading as partnership. They are an attempt to return to an African ethic of accompaniment and mutual recognition. One cannot walk with people without knowing who they are, why they do what they do, what histories they carry, and how their work is rooted in place. Relationship matters.
This too is a practice of dignity. It interrupts the familiar power dynamic that expects those in need to travel toward those who hold resources, legitimacy, and discretionary power. One office shared that it had previously been excluded from departmental and EU funding simply because it could not afford transport. The irony is devastating. Communities most in need of support are often required to perform mobility, fluency, and institutional sophistication in order to access it. By travelling to communities ourselves, we reject that logic. We affirm instead that accompaniment begins with presence, listening, and the humility to encounter people where they are rather than where institutions expect them to be.
This requires intentionally dismantling what is often veiled as due diligence but functions as a subtle architecture of power asymmetry: take this shape, speak this language, adopt this structure, perfect this performance of professionalism, or risk exclusion. In this sense, conventional philanthropy can become less about solidarity than about disciplining communities into recognisable administrative forms. We are committed to resisting the reproduction of demeaning and subservient relationships to money and to recognising that the value of this work is not one-sided; the benefits of genuine partnership are mutual, and support must therefore be approached in a spirit of reciprocity rather than patronage.
Instead, we hold open the possibility of money as medicine, a resource that enables communities and civil society formations to participate actively in undoing the root causes of social harm. In this sense, Ubuntu must move beyond moral sentiment into the socioeconomic realm. As thinkers such as Mogobe Ramose remind us, human dignity and collective flourishing remain impossible while land, territory, labour, and the means of production remain alienated from the people. Liberation therefore cannot be reduced to symbolic inclusion within systems that continue to produce dispossession. It requires restitution, sovereignty, redistribution, and the material conditions necessary for communities to shape their own futures.
What we are finding is that communities often described as forgotten, marginal, or out of reach are already generating innovative, if sometimes rudimentary, forms of reclamation rooted in locality, mutual aid, agency, and sovereignty. They are not waiting passively for intervention. They are already building. Already adapting. Already creating infrastructures of care and survival beneath conditions of abandonment. What they often lack is not vision or legitimacy, but stable resources capable of transforming fragile survival into durable institutional presence.
This fundamentally challenges dominant ideas of sustainability. Too often, corporatised NGOs remain trapped in the exhausted cycle of one more grant, one more endowment, one more foundation, all in service of sustaining extractive and ultimately unsustainable models of civil society. Sustainability, in our context, cannot mean refining the art of begging.
Sustainability must instead mean strengthening local productive capacity, mutual aid systems, community ownership, and democratic control over resources. It means building institutions capable of remaining accountable first to the people they serve rather than to shifting donor fashions but relentlessly protecting trust through transparency and accountability with unassailable fiduciary care. This resonates deeply with Pan-Africanist and Nkrumahist traditions, which insist that freedom without economic sovereignty leaves African societies vulnerable to neocolonial dependence and perpetual extraction.
In walking with these offices, one thing becomes unmistakably clear: philanthropy should be a means toward actualisation, restoration, and reparation, not a performance of relevance or a pathway toward institutional comfort or retirement or lifestyle funds for salaried executives insulated from the conditions they theorise. We are attentive to dismantling aid architectures built on extraction, opportunism, and the quiet violence of discretionary denial.
We are not seeking partners who can merely perform change through intangible milestones and donor-friendly abstractions while the material realities of neighbours, schools, workers, families, and elders remain fundamentally untouched. We are seeking evidence of rootedness, reciprocity, courage, and community trust.
These visits therefore mark the beginning of a different dialogue, one in which we are learning to sit, listen, and be taught before we intervene. In that process, conventional understandings of funding relationships begin to crack open because people realise we are not there to intensify surveillance, demand submission, or wield institutional power through hidden conditions and arbitrary exclusion. As a result we have witnessed them opening up even the more about their true vision.
And this is where another truth becomes unavoidable. Transition without economic transformation is not liberation. The South African experience has shown this with painful clarity. The end of formal oppression means little when wealth, land, infrastructure, and economic power remain structurally concentrated. Liberation demands redistributive justice, economic sovereignty, wealth restructuring, and a decisive break from neoliberal capitalism, which continues to marginalise working-class Black communities while preserving historical patterns of dispossession beneath the language of democracy and inclusion.
What these visits are teaching us is that truly community-rooted civil society already exists. The question is whether philanthropy is prepared to resource it in ways that deepen sovereignty rather than dependency, agency rather than compliance, and collective flourishing rather than institutional self-preservation.
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