Formerly known as African Visionary Fund, the African Collaborative is unlocking the power of local solutions to drive lasting change.
I’m tremendously honored and honestly super excited to have joined the African Collaborative Board to support the organization’s mission of investing in African changemakers working across education, health, livelihoods, technology, climate, justice, and gender equity.
Their mission is “to provide African-led organizations with vital resources to create purposeful, locally rooted change. It’s essentially = African solutions for African problems with the financial boost to make it happen!
I’ve also seen how transformative it can be when African leaders are empowered to lead, and I’m thus thrilled to support the work of such an inspiring community to bring about lasting impact across the continent.
We’re honored to welcome four extraordinary leaders, Eddie Mandhry, Carol Warui, Clara Ngando, and Akua Gyekye, to the African Collaborative Board.
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The African Visionary Fund (AVFund) is unleashing breakthrough impact by driving resources to high-impact African founders.
Our belief is simple-when tackling challenges and improving lives on the continent, proximity matters.
Despite their potential for impact, African-led organizations receive less than 5.2% of all US foundation giving across Africa and less than 0.4% of all international funding.
We envision a world where African visionaries are recognized and resourced by funders for their ability to accelerate progress and drive systems change on the continent.
The AVFund got started in 2020 and we are entering an exciting moment of growth as we expand our funding partnerships and our portfolio of African changemakers, launch our philanthropic systems change strategy, and grow our team to help us deliver on our ambitious vision.
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We have a small but mighty team of 7 spread across 3 time zones and 4 countries.
In the last three years we have raised close to $8M, committed over $4.5M in flexible multi-year funding to 25 African changemakers, been featured in the New York Times and The Guardian, and we are just getting started!
We believe deeply in our core values of Transformative Impact, Equity, Solidarity, Trust and Integrity, and Striving to Learn.
We strive to take the path aligned to these values at every decision juncture, even if the less values-aligned path might be faster or easier.
“Trust-based philanthropy” is a phrase that has attracted a lot of buzz lately among funders.
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While we know that local leaders and organizations are best suited for leading solutions in their own communities, they are, unfortunately, chronically and systemically least funded.
The latest available data shows that only 5.2% of grant dollars directed to Sub-Saharan Africa from US foundations go to local organizations.
Unnerved by what she saw in her longtime career in the social sector space, Atti was motivated to make a difference.
She joined the AVFund as co-CEO alongside Katie Bunten-Wamaru to reimagine what philanthropy could look like-starting with who gets funded.
IF’s Teresa Mbagaya recently had a conversation with Atti to learn more about African Visionary Fund’s mission.
At the heart of the conversation was how funders can embed trust-based, adaptive practices, influence where capital is deployed, and how power is shared.
AVFund: At the African Visionary Fund, our mission is to drive more funding to African leaders to accelerate their impact.
Our model is laser focused on shifting capital and decision-making power to African organizations through an integrated model of finding, funding and amplifying the impact of proximate African organizations and advocating for systemic changes in the philanthropic sector.
IF: I’m intrigued by how you said you look toward systemic change and impact, in support of proximate leaders and founders.
AVFund: The data is very clear that African-led organizations are chronically underfunded.
And, the power to change that lands in the hands of funders.
Funders are the ones to make decisions on where and who they fund.
There is room to change how they fund by looking into their processes and systems.
IF: We hear a lot about trust-based philanthropy and trust-based practices.
AVFund: For me, trust-based philanthropy starts with trust-based relationships, and you have to earn trust.
As funders, I believe that it is our responsibility to earn trust from the partners that we work with so that we can have a two-way trust-based relationship.
Being a trust-based funder is really a continuous practice and not a destination.
During the conversation, Atti also shared an inspirational example of local partners coming together in times of crisis.
A few months ago, Cyclone Freddy caused widespread devastation in Southern Africa.
None of the organizations that the AVFund works with in Malawi do relief work on a daily basis, but given the situation they were in, they sprang into action to serve their communities.
“It was incredibly inspiring to experience people coordinating to meet up and drop off supplies,” Atti shared with us.
Learn more: We believe that a partnership between Imaginable Futures and African Visionary Fund will help to accelerate their unrestricted funding support of proximate leaders, and we hope that it will increase interest and commitment from the funding community towards localization and trust-based philanthropy.
In late January, the African Visionary Fund announced their fourth cohort, and have now made a $8.2 million commitment to 35 partners in their portfolio.
Their work is multisectoral and cuts across issue areas including education, health, equity, human rights, livelihoods, climate justice and more.
While African Visionary Fund continues to strive to achieve their mission, all programatic work in 2023 was through their fiscal sponsor, Myriad USA formerly known as King Baudouin Foundation United States.
Almost all programatic revenue and expenses have been recorded and reported by their fiscal sponsor.
African Visionary Fund received their 501c3 in 2023, and opened a separate bank account to begin the separation process from the fiscal sponsor.
Nonprofit has not claimed this pageDonations are tax-deductible769 CENTRE ST SUITE 201 BOSTON MA 02130-2557BOSTON MA | IRS ruling year: 2023 | EIN: 92-0715931
Organization MissionThe African Visionary Fund was established to address inequities in philanthropy by providing unrestricted funding to local African organizations.
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The first thing to notice about the African Visionary Fund is that it is called the African Visionary Fund.
The idea for the African Visionary Fund began at the Segal Family Foundation, an American foundation focusing its work on funding Sub-Saharan African communities.
In 2017 - ten years after that visit to Rwanda - the Foundation launched the African Visionary Fellowship.
Bunten-Wamaru was working at Segal at this time, performing a sort of matchmaking service for the funding project by trying to help Western foundations find African-led organisations to fund.
‘I kept running into these walls with funders. They would say: “I get it, I understand that locally-led organisations are more sustainable, they’re able to navigate local contexts, they understand the problems they’re addressing more deeply and with more nuance than outsider-led organisations.
