Mpho Raboeane
We arrived to witness the work. But as the visits unfolded, the gaze kept returning to us. What exactly had we come to see? What needed to be verified? Whose confidence was the itinerary meant to secure?
The questions became harder to avoid because the work did not begin with us, and its meaning could not be contained by our reporting categories. The partners knew the ground, the histories and the stakes. We arrived with the grant.
Across the Free State, Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga, we encountered changes that could easily be mistaken for ordinary administration. A room had been secured. An organisation had strengthened its systems. A partner could finally point to a place of its own from which to work, loosening the constant anxiety of transience produced by insecure tenure.
None of this is incidental. Permanence is political when communities and their institutions have been made to live provisionally.
In Mpumalanga, a nearly completed multipurpose centre will bring an advice office and paralegal services, after-school programmes and a library, driving licence-readiness support, a satellite point for commissioners of oaths and a computer skills centre under one roof. Seen through a project lens, these are deliverables. Seen from the ground, they raise a different question: why must one community institution gather together the functions that public systems have fragmented, withdrawn or made difficult to reach?
The centre is not simply evidence that funding has worked. It is evidence of how people organise life in the gaps between institutions.
Community advice offices repeatedly appeared as something like the central nervous system of this organising. Around them sit mutual aid, food security and sovereignty, water scarcity, access to social protection, education, gender-based violence and femicide, disability awareness, youth unemployment and pathways into work. The grant did not invent this intelligence. It gave existing relationships more room, reach and material form.
That distinction matters.
One of the partners is developing a relationship with Services SETA (Sector Education and Training Authorities) to create training and employment pathways for around twenty women fieldworkers, their “sisterhood alumni”, whose prospects might otherwise have ended when a project closed in July. There is something uncomfortable in the phrase “when a project closed”. Philanthropy is very good at making endings look administrative. A contract reaches its end date. A budget line closes. A report is submitted. But the people whose labour carried the work remain. So do their obligations, their relationships, their aspirations and their need for a livelihood.
Grantmaking governs through time as much as through money. It decides when work begins, when it becomes legible and when it is deemed complete. Communities live in another time. Their crises do not keep to funding cycles, and neither do their relationships.
This sharpened something for me about freedom.
We often speak about freedom as an idea: the freedom to imagine, to choose, to believe that another world is possible. But freedom is also particular. It has a location. It requires material conditions. And when it is real, it is felt.
Amartya Sen’s account of development as substantive freedom is useful here. What matters is not only what resources people receive, but what those resources actually enable them to be and do. A grant can pay for activity without expanding the range of choices available to people. It can produce outputs while leaving the underlying conditions of life largely untouched.
The question I keep coming back to is therefore not simply, “What did the grant fund?” But rather, “What became possible because of it?”
A secure space creates continuity. An organisation with stronger systems can negotiate differently. A trained fieldworker can carry a livelihood beyond a project. A community institution can make an otherwise fragmented state more navigable. Relationships between organisations can allow knowledge and practice to travel. These things may sound modest from the vantage point of a funder. On the ground, they can alter the room people have to move.
Freedom has an infrastructure.
This is also where the visits turned the gaze back towards LFI. We still have habits of the funder that are difficult to dislodge. We define the problem. We fix the timetable. We decide what counts as evidence. We retain the authority to judge whether transformation has occurred. Even a flexible grant can leave that deeper arrangement intact. We may loosen the conditions without relinquishing the position from which those conditions are set. This is where the language of decolonial grantmaking becomes uncomfortable.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor refuses the ease with which decolonisation can become a generous synonym for inclusion, participation or doing development better. Their insistence on the repatriation of indigenous land and life is deliberately difficult. It prevents us from congratulating ourselves too quickly.
For philanthropy, the warning is direct. We cannot call a practice decolonial simply because it is participatory, compassionate or less restrictive. The question is whether authority moves.
Money can become medicine when it repairs relationships, creates room for organising and renews the possibility of sovereignty. It can also remain a means of supervision, even when the language surrounding it is progressive.
The difference is not captured by the size of the grant or even by how flexible it is. It lies in who gets to name what matters, whose knowledge is treated as authoritative, who interprets what happened, whose learning travels and whether a partner can refuse the terms on offer.
This, for me, is where the LFI proposition becomes interesting. I don’t think LFI should be understood simply as a fund that gives more flexible money to organisations that conventional philanthropy has overlooked. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
The more ambitious proposition is that capital can make room for people to judge, choose and act on their own terms:
Room to respond to what was not anticipated in the proposal. Room to build an institution rather than endlessly deliver a project. Room to retain people after a funding cycle ends. Room to experiment, fail, adapt and try again. Room for relationships that cannot be reduced to outputs. And, importantly, room for communities to decide what is worth building in the first place.
That means thinking about grantmaking less as purchasing predetermined outcomes and more as underwriting possibility. It also means accepting that possibility carries risk.
The second round of visits left me less certain about our answers and clearer about the question. Our task is not to become better architects of other people’s liberation. Nor is it to romanticise communities or pretend that outside expertise has no place. It is to know when our expertise should support, when it should step back, and when the people closest to the work know something we cannot know from a boardroom or a proposal.
We saw a room secured. A centre rising. A livelihood extended beyond the life of a project. Practices shared between organisations. Community institutions becoming better able to hold life. These are not the whole story. But they are evidence of something important: people making more room for themselves to act.
My faith, ultimately, is in that capacity. Not the thin idea that people can overcome structural conditions through individual will, but the much more material proposition that people can exercise agency when the conditions around them allow it to become consequential. Perhaps that is what the ground is teaching us.
The harder work is ours: to surrender the authority to decide in advance what freedom must look like, and to accept that the ground may be teaching us not how to lead, but how to follow. And perhaps the most radical discipline for LFI is to become comfortable with the fact that we may not be the ones who know what comes next.
