We mark three painful years since the outbreak of the conflict in Sudan, a conflict which has devastated Sudanese people, scattered families, destroyed livelihoods and shaken the foundations of the nation. Women and girls bear the brunt of the crisis, facing increased violence, and severely limited access to protection and essential services. We, as faith leaders and faith-based organisations responding in Sudan, urge concrete, accountable commitments through the Berlin Conference and beyond to uphold human rights and protect civilians and frontline responders.

Sudanese local actors, including women, youth and mutual aid groups, are at the forefront of the response. Communities remain resilient, with long-standing solidarity networks. Among these, faith-based actors play a vital role through their trusted presence in vulnerable and hard-to-reach areas, delivering essential services such as food, health, nutrition and WASH, alongside livelihoods, spiritual care and psychosocial support to restore dignity and agency. 

Read full statement here.

By Mpho Raboeane – May 2026

On Thursday, 23 April, our team met with the leadership of Community Advice Offices South Africa (CAOSA), including its Chairperson, Deputy Chief Justice Dunstan Mlambo, and acting co-directors Seth Mguni and Wayne Ncube. Our conversation returned, as it so often does, to familiar pressures facing the sector: chronic underfunding, the absence of formal recognition, and uneven state support. These challenges are longstanding and structural, shaping the daily reality of community advice offices and the people who sustain them.

Yet what stayed with me long after the meeting was not scarcity, but the extraordinary social and moral weight this sector continues to carry despite having so little material support. Community advice offices remain among the most important, and least recognised, forms of social infrastructure in South Africa.

Community advice offices occupy the space between what the law promises and what people are actually able to access. They are the places people turn to when trying to secure a birth certificate, challenge an unlawful dismissal, access a social grant, escape violence, or hold on to a home. In doing so, they become sites of trust, mediation, political education, and community organising.

This role is deeply rooted in South Africa’s history. From the 1960s through the 1980s, advice offices formed part of the wider architecture of resistance to apartheid. With the support of organisations such as the Black Sash, paralegals helped communities navigate pass laws, forced removals, labour exploitation, and the dense bureaucratic machinery used to control Black life. In that period, the law was not neutral; it was an instrument of domination. Advice offices made the law intelligible to those it was designed to exclude, carving out pathways through systems meant to frustrate, displace, and silence. In doing so, they built local power and collective resilience under immense pressure.

The democratic transition transformed South Africa’s constitutional framework but did not eliminate the distance between formal rights and lived realities. While the Constitution promises dignity, equality, and access to justice, these remain difficult to realise without practical support. Today, through CAOSA’s coordination, community advice offices operate in more than 250 locations across the country, from densely populated townships to remote rural villages, in some instances with a single office supporting dozens of surrounding communities.

Their significance lies not only in the issues they address, but in how they restore agency. To sit with someone, explain their options, guide them through a process, and accompany them through an often hostile system is a profoundly political act. It insists that the poor are not outside the law and affirms that dignity is not theoretical.

My own understanding of this work was shaped during my articles of clerkship, visiting communities dispossessed of their ancestral land and engaged in long struggles for justice, reparation, and return. I learned from the deeply knowledgeable Bab’Mtshali, whose understanding combined legal insight with lived history. In Orange Farm, I witnessed forms of community empowerment and economic solidarity through initiatives such as Bab’Bricks and the local advice office. Alongside Mme Josephine, I was part of providing legal advice and referral support in contexts where even small interventions could make a tangible difference.

Deputy Chief Justice Mlambo himself cut his teeth in advice offices across Soweto, where early exposure to community-based justice work helped shape a legal career grounded in access, dignity, and accountability, values that continue to inform his leadership today, including as Chairperson of CAOSA.

And yet, despite the sector’s undeniable importance, it remains structurally precarious. Advice offices operate with inconsistent funding, limited recognition, and minimal institutional protection, while being expected to absorb the consequences of deep and persistent inequality.

This contradiction reveals something fundamental about how justice is maintained in South Africa. Much of what keeps communities functioning does not happen through well-resourced institutions. It happens through under-recognised labour, carried out by people who continue to serve despite instability because they understand what is at stake.

The advice office sector quietly holds together the relationship between people and the promises of democracy. If we are serious about justice, this sector cannot remain an afterthought. Supporting paralegals is not peripheral social support; it is an investment in the everyday functioning of democracy. In a society still marked by inequality, community advice offices sustain the conditions under which democratic life becomes possible.

That is their work – every single day.

In the months before a local government election, something shifts in how candidates engage with the wards they hope to represent. Doors that have stayed closed for four years are knocked on. Promises that no one was making last year are made freely. Once the votes are counted, and the winning candidate starts earning a salary, their engagement fades to almost nothing. And, as most of us know and have experience, most of them will not be back until the next election approaches.

Local Government Election 2026 — a moment of community power

The Community Manifestos initiative starts from a simple observation. In the weeks before an election, candidates need votes more than any resident needs any candidate. It is the only moment in five years when the balance of power tips toward the people living in a ward – the one moment during which a community can set the terms of its relationship with its councillor, rather than wait to be told what those terms will be. A community manifesto is potentially what an organised community can do in that moment to take power back.

The political system we enjoy does not favour community power. Most councillors are deployed by their parties, often into wards they have no connection to. Once elected, their loyalty runs upward – to party leadership and municipal management – rather than to the people they are meant to serve. Fewer residents believe their ballot will change anything. Voter turnout has fallen from 58 per cent in 2000 to 46 per cent in 2021. What people see in their wards day to day gives them little reason to disagree with those who have stopped voting.

The 2026 elections present a particular opportunity. The political landscape is more competitive than it has been in a generation, with coalitions common and independent candidates standing in growing numbers. In many wards the margin between winning and losing is small, and an organised, informed community has real power.

What is a community manifesto?

A community manifesto rests on three things. The first is the priorities the ward agrees through a structured, broad-reaching process –  water, sanitation, housing, safety, roads, or whatever residents themselves identify as urgent. The second is the standards expected of the councillor, for example: living in the ward, being contactable, communicating honestly, declaring financial interests, and treating every resident with the same respect. The third is the accountability practices required once that councillor is elected: regular public report-back meetings, written progress reports, an independent oversight group, a written commitment to step down if they clearly break the compact, and anything else the community considers reasonable.

Once the manifesto is finalised, every candidate standing for the ward is invited to a public event at which they are asked to sign a compact committing to its priorities, standards, and accountability practices. The signing event is public on purpose. Its power comes not only from the signature but from how visibly organised the ward is and how broad the process behind the document was. Candidates who refuse to sign do so openly, in front of the residents whose votes they are asking for. In a competitive ward where people are organised and paying attention, refusing to sign can be a costly position.

How a community manifesto is built

The Community Manifesto process is designed to fit the rhythms of community life rather than disrupt them. The work can run over roughly three months, in five steps, and depends on what most community formations already have: organised people, communication channels, and a willingness to follow through. It does not require outside consultants or significant new funding. What it does require is coordination, time, and the patience to do each step properly.

Step one — organising and spreading the word.

A coordinator within the community formation makes contact with the local groups already at work in the area (for example, residents’ associations, faith communities, advice offices, sports clubs, street committees) and brings them into the conversation. Notices go out through WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, community noticeboards, and word of mouth at gatherings residents already attend. The aim is to reach as many people living in the ward as possible, so that every household has a fair chance of hearing that the process is under way and can take part if they choose to.

Step two — a survey across the whole ward.

This is the step that the credibility of the whole exercise depends on. The survey could be done in two ways at once: an online form distributed through social media, and door-to-door visits conducted by trained community members. Both routes are necessary, because the door-to-door route is what reaches the residents who cannot otherwise show up — pensioners, residents without internet access, and those for whom a large public meeting is not a comfortable place to speak. It also provides a point of connection, building a more human engagement. The questions are simple: what are the biggest problems in this ward, what should be expected of a councillor, and how should that councillor account to residents? Every household reached strengthens the manifesto. Every household missed weakens it.

Step three — sharing the findings back.

Survey results are taken to the community through open meetings and through smaller, focused discussions with the groups whose voices are easily missed in larger gatherings. The intention is not to present a finished manifesto but to test, refine, and settle on the priorities and standards that will go into one. This is the step at which the document moves from being the work of a coordinator to being the work of the ward.

Step four — drafting and circulating.

A small drafting team writes the manifesto, drawing on the survey, the meetings, and any existing community charter, constitution, or earlier consultations. The draft is shared widely before it is finalised so that residents can suggest changes. The credibility of the document is built in this step as much as in the survey. The more people who have had genuine input, the harder it becomes for any candidate to dismiss the manifesto as the view of a small group.

Step five — the public signing event.

All candidates standing for the ward are invited to a public town hall meeting at which the manifesto is presented and they are asked to sign the compact in full view of the community. This must happen before the formal election campaign begins. In the weeks before the campaign, an organised community with specific written demands has the most power — and the most ability to shape what candidates have to commit to in order to be taken seriously as leaders.

What needs to happen now

The hardest part of the process, in practice, is reaching the residents who are routinely left out. Pensioners, women, young people, residents without internet access, those who do not usually attend public meetings — whether their views are in the manifesto is what gives it real authority. This is also the part of the process most often shortened under time pressure, and it is worth resisting that pressure. A manifesto that genuinely represents the ward is one a candidate cannot easily refuse to sign.

Three months is enough time. It is also not very much time. The work that needs to happen now is the easiest to begin: identifying the coordinator, mapping the local structures already in place, agreeing the lines of communication, and drawing up the survey. Everything else depends on those early decisions. The window will not stay open, and the work to use it must begin before the campaigning does.

* The manifestos work sits inside two larger programmes that frame and support it. The first is the work of My Vote Counts through the Democracy from Below – Civic Formations Collaboration for People’s Power 2026, where the manifesto initiative is one of several instruments for shifting power back to communities. The second is the ACT Ubumbano Accountability Project, whose ground-level community conversations have provided much of the lived evidence on which the manifesto template now rests. The two programmes are complementary: the civic formations collaboration provides the political framing and the link to a potential wider movement for a Right to Recall in South African law, with the Accountability Project providing the empirical foundation – what residents in real wards actually say they need from a councillor, and what they would accept as a minimum standard of accountability.

May 2026

Kagiso Trust has asked ACT Ubumbano to lead the process of establishing a new, independent institution that will be a resource to South African civil society. Currently referred to as the Leverage Fund Institute (LFI), its objectives will include mobilising funds to be used for transformative grantmaking, learning support for organisations, and platforms to transform and strengthen the civil society ecosystem. Regular progress updates will feature in future newsletters for now.

To lead this pilot phase that will primarily involve systems design and testing, we are happy to introduce Yoko Papu and Mpho Raboeane.

We are excited to announce the launch of our newly redesigned website—www.actubumbano.org. This milestone signifies an important step in how we share our work, connect with our partners, and engage with communities across Southern African countries and beyond. It shows our growth toward greater accessibility, dynamism, and impact.

The site navigation is now more intuitive, making it easier to find our work, our partner information, and what is happening within our network. The new site uses strong visuals and clear content, highlighting how our work is rooted in people, communities, and lived experiences. You can now easily discover our partners’ work in solidarity with marginalised communities. Our publications section is now easier to use, providing several options to access our research and insights.

This site is built for you! Dive in, explore, and share your thoughts so we can keep improving. Visit www.actubumbano.org and let us know what you think!

The Accountability Project is an exploratory process that aims to strengthen community agency and voice in monitoring government performance in South Africa. It has three components: understanding local accountability mechanisms and how people engage with these (Community Engagement), establishing a data-driven platform to create an evidence base for accountability (Data), and working with partners to strengthen advocacy for greater government accountability (Strategy and Tactics).

Working in partnership with five civil society organisations and 10 of their community partners, the  Project facilitated 76 community engagements across five provinces.

Click here to meet the team behind the Accountability Project and learn their stories.

ACT Ubumbano invites proposals from community and activist organisations for funding to support actions that may be responses to the impact of environmental, gender and economic injustice on communities, or campaigns to change particular situations that communities are struggling with. The action must be implemented and completed by 30 November 2026.

If you have received at least two grants in the last four years, please do not apply to allow other organisations an opportunity. Similarly, if you have not yet provided a final report for a grant received in 2025, please do not apply. There will be another call for proposals in 2027.

Proposals may be for a maximum of ZAR30,000 (Thirty thousand South African Rands). Amounts allocated may be less than this to reach as many applicants as possible.

Proposals must be completed in full and submitted online. The deadline for submission is 14h00 (SAST) on Thursday 24 March 2026. You are encouraged to complete the online application as early as possible.

There is always an overwhelming response to this call, and assessing applications will take time. While there will be regular communication on the status of your application, you will need to find patience as the review process is happening.

What will be supported?

There is a limited budget available for this call, so ACT Ubumbano consider the following in allocating grants:

• The proposed work is led by or directly involves people who are affected by the issue.
• The proposed work seeks to change the root causes or conditions of injustice.
• The proposed work has potential to bring new knowledge that can be shared with others.
• The budget is in proportion to the action that will be undertaken.
• The organisation has demonstrated capability to undertake the action, or has a plan to work with others who have the capability.

Who can apply?

The opportunity is open to any registered non-profit organisation or association that is part of the ACT Ubumbano network, or willing to work with ACT Ubumbano partner organisations in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland (Eswatini), Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Any funding is intended to help with taking action for change. It is not intended for general or core support for organisations, although some of the funds may be used for organisational costs.

What will NOT be supported!

ACT Ubumbano will NOT support any action that undermines the dignity of people and the earth, or that are:

• Homophobic or discriminatory against people from the LGBTI+ community,
• Sexist and undermining of the dignity of women,
• Xenophobic and discriminatory against foreign nationals,
• Generally harmful to any vulnerable or marginalised group in society, or
• Environmentally destructive and working against efforts to fight climate change.

Furthermore, purchase of livestock, building materials, or inputs that are used in development work (sewing machines, tools, etc), cannot be supported. Relief and humanitarian work cannot be supported, nor can scholarships, school fees, and conference attendance costs.

Questions can be addressed to thabo@actubumbano.org.

Please email hub[@]actubumbano.org and copy thabo[@]actubumbano.org if you have queries or need clarification.

Last week, in a room in Johannesburg — small enough that someone joked we needed to turn up the aircon just to make space for honest thinking — activists, organisers, researchers, and advocates gathered for a conversation with no closing declarations, only questions worth carrying forward.

This was the Accountability Project’s strategy convening — a full day of sessions moving from the state of civil society in the GNU era to questions of corporate power, transparency, and the shrinking space for public accountability. We sat with the discomfort of asking what democratic engagement even means in 2026, on the eve of local government elections, in a country where more and more people are simply walking away from the formal democratic project.

Our conversation forms part of a longer journey: a series of conversations held across the country with community activists and affected communities, all trying to make sense of a political moment that keeps shifting beneath our feet.

At ground level, communities are increasingly fluent in local government mechanics. Independent candidates are emerging. Ward processes are being scrutinised. People understand where caucus decisions happen before the council floor. There is energy that belongs to no party and no NGO.

But that energy is emerging in a context of deep democratic fatigue. Voter participation continues to decline. A growing number of people, particularly young people, are organising outside of the structures that formal civil society recognises — not because they are apathetic, but because the formal structures have not earned their trust.

These conversations are not happening in isolation. Over this past weekend, events unfolding in Iran and the UAE have once again reminded us how fragile civic space can be — how quickly state power consolidates, how narratives are controlled, and how citizens are left negotiating fear, fatigue, and uncertainty. What’s happening beyond our borders isn’t someone else’s problem. It’s a mirror for the exact same questions we’re sitting with here – about democracy, accountability and who ultimately holds power.

The erosion is not only institutional, it is interior.

When communities in the Accountability Project’s research were asked what accountability means to them, they didn’t speak about oversight or legal mechanisms. They said: a duty of care. And when that duty is absent — when the promise isn’t kept, when the complaint is logged and nothing moves — people don’t just disengage from the mechanism. They disengage from the democratic project itself.

To make sense of what that interior erosion means — and what restoring it might require —I want to use an unconventional lens to get at something that political analysis alone keeps missing.

In the introduction to The Lemonade Reader[1], scholars Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis describe Beyoncé’s artistic practice as drawing on centuries of spiritual tradition, black aesthetic history, and the everyday textures of black womanhood to make something that is simultaneously personal, communal, and politically alive.

A few years ago, when I first engaged with this text in a reading group led by Prof Salma Lee-Shae Scharnick-Udemans during Covid, what struck me was the argument about agency. It challenged me to reconsider how narrowly we often define the political, and how urgently we need to expand our notions of political agency beyond protest alone.

Lindsey Stewart traces the debate between two ways of understanding what black cultural production is for: Richard Wright’s demand that it face outward — toward confrontation, struggle, resistance against the oppressor — and Zora Neale Hurston’s counterclaim on something more interior, more rooted, more concerned with the fullness of self that must exist before outward struggle can be sustained (Stewart, 2019).

Hurston’s strategy in writing about the folk figure High John de Conquer[2] appears first as “a whisper”, a will to hope. Before he walks the plantation, he lives inside people. He was one who “beat the unbeatable”, not through escape from brutality or open confrontation, but through wit, spirit, and an undiminishable interior life. What he gave enslaved people, Hurston tells us, was “an inside thing to live by”.

That thing was what gave people the capacity to endure conditions designed to extinguish their sense of self. Through this reference she points us to the politics of joy. Stewart argues that it is precisely this interior work — the cultivation of self-definition, the maintenance of joy and love and dignity as political categories — that both Wright and bell hooks miss when they critique Hurston and Beyoncé’s politics. What they mistake for an absence of politics is in fact a different kind of politics: one concerned with what Zandria Robinson calls “the alignment, the stillness, the readying, the quiet, before the twerk, the turn-up, the (social) movement” (Robinson 2016).

Might this “formation” also be a way of imagining community — of turning what looks like a personal test into a shared, collective struggle? If so, then mobilising toward an interior formation offers a generative account of agency.

The question, in my view, pressing against our convening last week is whether South African civil society has neglected its own formation work.

We have mastered the grammar of rights. We litigate. We draft submissions. We attend stakeholder consultations. The Constitutional Court jurisprudence is real and significant. But as someone observed sharply in the room: “winning on paper is not the same as winning in the world”.

What came through in the closing conversations was a call for a different kind of political imagination — one that does not simply defend existing democratic institutions or demand their destruction but asks harder questions about what democratic practice actually feels like from the inside.

In my own work — whether thinking about waqf [3] as liberation infrastructure, or about accountability as care, or faith as a material ethic rather than a private comfort — I keep returning to the same tension: compliance is not transformation. And proximity to power, however flattering, is not the same as holding it accountable.

And I wonder if the crisis of this moment is not simply electoral or institutional, but spiritual in the broadest most political sense?

Not some spiritual wash or retreat. Spiritual as formation.

We are in Ramadan‚ a period that is structurally about exactly this: the interior discipline that precedes and enables outward action. The cultivation of something inside that doesn’t collapse under pressure. The practice of returning, daily, to what you actually believe and why. Ramadan doesn’t produce transformation by announcing it. It produces it through the slow, unglamorous, often painful work of showing up to the practice even when you are tired, even when the results are invisible, even when the world outside is not cooperating.

If communities are already building knowledge at the edges of formal politics, already asking harder questions about who makes decisions and where, how does civil society meet that energy without instrumentalising it?

So, I don’t want to end with answers. I want to end with a question, inspired from the room, and that I think deserves to stay open.

What is the inside thing we are cultivating now, in our organisations, in our movements, in ourselves — that will determine what kind of democracy becomes possible next?

 [1] Brooks, Kinitra D., and Kameelah L. Martin, eds. 2019. The Lemonade Reader: Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality. New York: Routledge.

[2] Hurston, Zora Neale. 1943. “High John de Conquer”. The American Mercury 57 (October): 450–458.

[3] A waqf is a permanent Islamic charitable endowment whose assets cannot be sold or transferred, with only the proceeds used to support social causes.