From Band-Aids to Big Bets

Redefining philanthropy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sung by superstars, Do They Know It’s Christmas, was one of the United Kingdom’s best-selling songs of the 1980s. Its success led to the subsequent year’s Live Aid, a benefit concert organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia.

Concertgoers remember Live Aid for the making of successful performers like U2; However, for its beneficiaries and their descendants, Live Aid led the proliferation of the African stereotype: impoverished, filthy, lazy, and ignorant. In the years that followed, images of Africans, including children, in their most vulnerable state and without their consent, were awash in Western media.

It became commonplace for the charity sector to ask supporters to save a starving, destitute child in Africa, without context, dignity, and cultural sensitivity. Forty years later, these stereotypes, accompanied by a dangerous saviour complex and exploitation, continue to follow the continent and people of African descent.

Live Aid was a pioneer, opening up the continent to anyone with a mission and money, even if either or both were fuelled by questionable motives. Some of these missions have led to sexual violence, neocolonialism, modern slavery, corporate profiteering, and human trafficking.

While arguments can be made in favour of the 50 million pounds raised at Live Aid, its negative aftermath, including links to funding rebel arms in a conflict that cost Ethiopia 28 billion dollars in damages, can not be ignored.

Ethical and sustainable change should be a priority in a world with deeply complex challenges, many of which affect Sub-Saharan Africa disproportionately. The impact sector must create solutions that address these problems, not cause further harm. Most importantly, Africans must be co-creators of this change. Learning from, and not repeating the mistakes of the past, is paramount to this shift.

When Demand is Not the Problem

The Rise of Big Bets Philanthropy

In March 2024, MacKenzie Scott donated 640 million dollars to hundreds of non-profit organisations, awarding some of these non-profits the largest cheques they’ve ever received. To date, Scott has donated over 26.3 billion dollars to the impact sector, joining the list of individuals and organizations taking big bets in philanthropy.

Defined by the MacArthur Foundation as, ‘time-limited investments in grantmaking with the potential for transformative change,’ big bets are large, unrestricted donations to organizations solving critical problems.

Depending on who you ask, big bets are measured by the size of the award, timing, risk involved, or the lack of restriction. For the Pershing Square Foundation, it is not about the size of the award but instead, about providing funding and supporting resources to social entrepreneurs, whenever and however they need it to make sustainable change. To critics like Larry Kramer, former president of the Hewlett Foundation, the better bet is giving consistently to smaller non-profits and social enterprises that are closer to the problems.

Personally, I consider big bets to be a reflection of the risk involved: the risk of not providing support in dire circumstances and the risk of not supporting a venture with the potential to have maximum impact.

Regardless of the size of the organization and award, big bet philanthropy has the potential to support the most impactful solutions driven by under-resourced founders in Sub-Saharan Africa who would typically not have access to such opportunities.

For example, a big bet award from The Rockefeller Foundation to Food4Education, an organization that began as a small kitchen twelve years ago, has led to 1.6 million Kenyan students receiving nutritious meals daily, along with increased enrollment in school. Without the funding, many children would have continued to attend school hungry, at risk of malnutrition, unable to properly absorb knowledge and a high likelihood of dropping out. Food4Education then received a 2-million-dollar grant from the Skoll Foundation to continue this transformative work. It is one of the most prominent locally-led school feeding programs in Africa today.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s investment in the non-profit has led to a 9-dollar return on every dollar donated, a high risk that has led to high rewards.

Big bets can also be a springboard for new organizations as well as social enterprises in hard-to-reach places serving the most vulnerable communities. Both ventures are often snubbed by funders. Most new organisations lack the highly-regarded traction and founder clout. But for organizations working in remote places, it is less simple. While funders may be interested in solving the problems faced by those at the last mile, their focus is often on partnering with renowned organizations typically led by principals who might lack the context, patience, and personal connection that distributing such interventions often requires.

With comparably smaller but equally impactful grants, funders like D-Prize invest in these outliers, taking bets on first-time founders reducing poverty in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

In 2018, Charlot Magayi won the D-Prize award to launch Mukuru Clean Stoves. Its goal was to reach 530 people in three months through a female-led business distributing affordable cookstoves to reduce health risks and combat poverty in the Kibera slums of Kenya. Mukuru Clean Stoves ran a successful pilot that led to savings in household fuel costs, prevention of respiratory diseases and, for women and girls, reduced time spent fetching firewood daily.

Four years later, Mukuru Clean Stoves became the winner of the Earth Shot Prize in 2022, receiving 1 million pounds in funding. Today, Mukuru Clean Stoves is used in 200,000 homes in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya.

Not only did this unprecedented, initial support lead to increased impact, but it also paved the way for further investment and innovation. This happened because a funder took a big bet on a social enterprise, which may not have been funded otherwise, and catapulted its impact.

Next essay: To Rip Off the Band-Aid, Bet on Social Innovation

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If you work in funding, social entrepreneurship, or social impact, I share reflections every two weeks.

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