Zambians are renowned for assisting anyone voluntarily.  They have a high tendency to offer help to strangers, and this has made them to be listed among the most generous countries in Africa. The CAF World Giving Index 2017 ranked Zambia as the 18th most charitable country in the world, and the 4th most charitable country in Africa.
However, despite these rankings, philanthropy as a sector receives scant attention and fails to play a role in the development debate in Zambia. Because of local philanthropy not being perceived as a necessary ingredient of development processes, local philanthropy falls through the cracks, missing out on the many opportunities it might offer to sustain important local initiatives. Traditional donor aid has contributed to nurture a culture of dependence, which not only permeates communities that have been beneficiaries of donor aid but also civil society organisations that have been used as the intermediaries through which aid is channeled.
Stimulating a conversation on the importance of local assets and asset building is one way of addressing the dependence culture trap within communities and civil society at large. Community endowment funds, which are rooted in the notion of local asset building, is one of the various approaches that can be used to sustain local citizen led development initiatives.
ZGF believes that there is a unique opportunity to change how these dynamics play out in a community, to disrupt the social breakdowns that occur from extreme imbalances, to break the old economic model and build a new one. We think this begins in part by inspiring a new kind of conversation and coordination among local nonprofits and the region’s active and growing philanthropic community.
In response to the above scenario, the Zambian Governance Foundation (ZGF) will launch a survey, revealing local giving patterns in Zambia on the 15th of March 2018. The purpose of the launch is to highlight the most interesting issues around local giving in Zambia as identified in the survey. Furthermore, the launch will provide a platform for different stakeholders to discuss and learn more about the emerging global community philanthropy field and the larger conversation to #ShiftThePowerZambia. This involves shifting the power closer to the ground, giving power to the local people and their organisations on the principle that they should have greater control of their own development.
The launch will also be an important opportunity to bring the topic of local philanthropy to the fore in an environment where civil society actors are still grappling with the question of how to sustain their operations in view of dwindling foreign donor aid and their future roles in this fast changing environment.
The list of participants to attend the launch will comprise representatives of community foundations from Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the Chairperson of the Africa Philanthropy Network, ZGF board and founders, ZGF grantees, civil society representatives, media, donors, representatives of the UN SDG platform, representatives from the business world and corporate sector as well as other friends of ZGF.
While, launching the report will serve as ZGF’s first step towards introducing the local philanthropy debate in Zambia, looking at the bigger picture, ZGF will establish community endowment funds to financially support worthy community led initiatives. In this, ZGF will provide a platform for community based organisations and individual citizens to develop and sustain endowment funds in support of initiatives, which they would have chosen as their priority. We see this as a way of encouraging development actors within Zambia to embrace and recognize community philanthropy as an important aspect of the development debate, not only in the context of foreign aid donors but also among international and indigenous NGOs. Moreover, with the widening gap between the rich and poor and a local civil society that is unable to mobilise its own resources, just waiting for the next project, we see community philanthropy as an alternative for promoting community self-sustenance. It's time to #ShiftThePowerZambia and have citizens engage in giving and contributing to transforming lives.