The curtain has come down on an era of global aid. Philanthropists know their giving cannot match the scale of official aid flows that have been shut off. But they can influence the next act, especially if they respond together and invest in models that promote coordination, efficiency, and locally rooted decision making.

Recent research by The Bridgespan Group explored the role of collaboratives amidst global aid volatility. This article focuses specifically on African collaboratives. It draws on data from 34 organisations, including qualitative interviews with collaboratives’ leaders, funders, and intermediaries, as well as a targeted survey covering almost 40 percent of known African collaboratives. We explored what collaboratives do in practice, what recent funding shifts reveal about their strengths and resilience, and how funders can best support them.

Four highlights from our research:

• Scale and momentum. Between 2022 and 2024, African collaboratives collectively received more than US$1 billion in funding.
• Growth appetite. Nearly 70 percent of collaboratives surveyed said they would ideally grow their budgets over the long term. Taken together, their stated growth ambitions suggest the capacity to absorb more than US$2 billion of additional funding over the next three years – roughly twice the funding they currently receive.
• Resilience with limits. Most collaboratives reported being minimally or moderately affected by aid cuts, with impacts felt primarily by partners on the ground. The ability to adjust strategies, programming, and operations to sustain partner networks underscores collaboratives role as “infrastructure,” helping partners respond when conditions change.
• Thin operating margins. While most collaboratives operate below their ideal budgets, nearly one-third – about 28 percent of those with available budget data – are smaller than US$1 million, revealing constraints on staffing, learning, and working at a systems-change level.

These findings point to a clear takeaway: many African collaboratives are absorbing growing demand in the wake of aid cuts and navigating complexity; however, they cannot do so indefinitely without funding and partnerships that match the work they’re doing.

What African Collaboratives Are – and Why They Matter Now

African collaboratives are multi-stakeholder efforts that bring together philanthropies, government, the private sector, and civil society. In our research, leaders described collaboratives as practical platforms for quickly moving resources, aligning partners, and sustaining local organisations when conditions shift.

The aid cuts are a prime example of shifting conditions. Many collaboratives told us they were not always hit first, but their partners were. As Françoise Moudouthe, CEO at the African Women’s Development Fund, shares, “Before we felt the cuts directly, we could feel their impact on our partners. The number of applications spiked, and the requests were more urgent in nature. As a fund, we are now being forced to do more with less.”

Koketso Rathumbu, advocacy and communications manager at the GBVF Response Fund, echoes the downstream pressure. “Although our fund has not been directly affected, some of the community-based organisations we support have been. We cannot turn a blind eye as a fund; it would be irresponsible. So we have had to fill gaps left by the cuts.”

Taken together, the feedback suggests that African collaboratives are playing a stabilising role: they help channel resources to locally led organisations, maintain partner networks, and adapt strategy as conditions change.

How Funders Can Unlock the Full Value of African Collaboratives

Our research identified four ways funders could shift how they engage with collaboratives to sustain partnerships and achieve stronger outcomes. The idea is to move from episodic, project-based funding towards support that strengthens the collaborative platform itself.

Anchor early and stay the course

Funders who take the time to understand a collaborative’s unique role and systems vision can unlock greater value than those who engage narrowly on programmes. Clarity about purpose, intended impact, and learning creates the foundation for mutual trust and long-term alignment. Among the African collaboratives surveyed, 81 percent said their earliest anchor funders covered more than 80 percent of their operating costs during the first five years – an indication of how early alignment can provide stability.

Consider SmartStart, a South African early childhood development initiative that received flexible capital and support from The DG Murray Trust, ELMA Philanthropies, and Yellowwoods Social Investments during its formative years. That early backing created space to test, learn, and validate a model designed for scale. Over time, funders – including philanthropies and government partners – coalesced around a clear systems goal: improve access to early childhood development nationally. SmartStart says this early backing and flexibility helped deepen and scale its impact, reaching more than 290,000 children and 24,000 quality early learning practitioners across South Africa by 2025.

“Our funders acted as co-creators and strategic partners, not just donors. Their participation has strengthened shared clarity of purpose and credibility, while creating valuable opportunities for mutual learning,” says Lilja Lakic, head of development at SmartStart.

By maintaining a shared systems vision, rather than moving from short-term project to short-term project, funders helped SmartStart build a nationally credible model, demonstrating that consistent support and strategic alignment can turn early commitment into sustained, scalable impact. A 2023 evaluation using the Early Learning Outcomes Measure, a South African-developed, population-based assessment tool that is used to determine if children aged 50-69 months are on track with expected developmental milestones, found that the percentage of SmartStart children “on track” increased from 43 percent to 64 percent in eight months, while the proportion “falling far behind” nearly halved. SmartStart says clarity of focus helped grow its overall budget sixfold over six years, reaching ZAR 250 million (US$13 million) in 2025.

Co-create and build relational trust

African collaboratives thrive on relational trust, a principle for partnerships built on mutual understanding, shared accountability, and long-term commitment. For funders, this means moving their philanthropy to a deeper mode of co-creation. Traditional models of engagement often involve attribution and control, whereas collaborative models build on proximity (trust in those closest to the work), patience, and shared learning.

For example, since its launch in 2011, the Ouagadougou Partnership Coordination Unit (OPCU) has served as the engine for a regional movement across nine West African countries working to double the number of women using modern contraceptives by 2030. Long-term, flexible funding from the Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and later the The David and Lucile Packard Foundation enabled OPCU to remain politically neutral, consistent, and trusted by governments.

“For our coordination arm, our three philanthropic funders have been key for us because of their flexibility and predictability. This allowed us to push back on too many leads and requests, including funding for the OPCU that we did not think aligned with our mandate,” says Director Marie Ba.

Between 2011 and 2021, contraceptive prevalence doubled across most member countries. OPCU’s experience shows that when funders invest in coordination and trust a collaborative’s function and leadership, collaboratives can sustain efforts over time and create the conditions for system-wide change. In this case, governments established dedicated family-planning units within their ministries of health, including Burkina Faso's Directorate of Family Health, Niger's Ministry of Public Health directorate coordinating family planning, and Mali's Sub-directorate of Reproductive Health.

Champion and crowd in peers

Funders can play a catalytic role in helping legitimise collaboratives and attracting additional capital. These funders act as validators in the field, offering visible confidence that reduces risk, encourages participation, and builds momentum among funders, intermediary organisations, and NGOs.

A good example is African Collaborative. Built on the belief that solutions for Africa should come from Africa, African Collaborative provides multiyear, unrestricted funding to African-led organisations, while providing space for local leaders to step into their power. In response to survey questions, the initiative reported supporting 35 African-led grassroots and community-based organisations and estimated that 74 percent of its FY2025 budget would be allocated to programmatic and regranting activities. Its funders served as connectors and champions, helping the organisation unlock new networks and grow towards its ambitious goal of raising US$50 million by 2030.

“Funders became advocates, not overseers. Through site visits, storytelling, and shared learning, they became not only champions of the work but multipliers of capital,” says Katie Bunten-Wamaru, co-CEO at African Collaborative. “We intentionally don’t have funders as founders [or in] governance roles. We are not willing to compromise on this because it ensures we preserve and prioritise the proximate and participatory decision making in our organisation and our grantmaking. The goal is for funders to see the value in the proximate expertise of our team and partners, and tap into that infrastructure to inform their own strategies and giving – but that’s a mindset shift for funders.”

This respectful distance reinforces trust and models integrity, setting a precedent for what shared power in philanthropy can look like. When funders act as champions – while respecting governance choices – collaboratives can grow capital and credibility without diluting their missions.

Align capital and expectations with the work’s horizon

Systems change takes time. African collaboratives often work across governments, communities, and organisations to address entrenched challenges that require patient and flexible capital. Yet short-term, restricted funding cycles remain a major constraint.

Africa Frontline First (AFF), for example, is a continent-wide platform built to strengthen government-led community health systems. Established during COVID-19 under the leadership of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia, AFF brought together Last Mile Health, the Financing Alliance for Health, and the Community Health Impact Coalition to pool their strengths in a durable initiative operating across the continent.

“Every time we say we need to do more with less, we should be saying ‘We need to do more together. It is the only way,’” says Nan Chen, co-executive director at AFF.

Through a dual funding strategy, AFF found core support for its secretariat and secured more than US$240 million from multilateral institutions and philanthropic partners to complement domestic budgets. In parallel, AFF works with the Africa CDC and The Global Fund to convene 14 partners around coordinated investments in community health. As part of that broader commitment, the Global Fund pledged US$900 million over three years, with 74 percent of those funds to be invested in Africa. To date, AFF and its partners have supported ministries of health in 18 countries to lead community health at scale, aligning financing, strengthening health systems, and building foundations for sustainable, government-owned programmes.

By aligning financing with government health strategies, AFF has transformed co-investment into lasting infrastructure, proving that when funders match capital and expectations to the time horizon of systems change, collaboratives can sustain progress and strengthen infrastructure that lasts long after the grant ends.

A New Compact for Collaboration

African collaboratives are redefining what resilient, equitable impact looks like. Our research points to both promise and constraint: many African collaboratives are absorbing stress, coordinating action, and sustaining local partners, often with limited operating margins and funding structures not designed for long-term systems change.

For funders, the opportunity extends beyond supporting individual initiatives to engaging with collaboratives as platforms for coordination, shared learning, scaling effective solutions, and proximity to local leadership. This research also highlights a clear imbalance: many African collaboratives are operating below their ideal budgets, even as they report the capacity to absorb significantly more capital and expand their impact.

Across the cases in this research, one theme stood out: relational trust shapes performance. When funders made early, flexible commitments, stayed engaged, and treated collaboratives as partners, collaboratives could position themselves to adapt, scale, and contribute to systems change. In practice, this has taken multiple forms – directing more flexible, long-term capital toward collaboratives, while also offering nonfinancial support such as peer connections, signalling credibility, and shared learning.

The question, then, is less about whether funders engage and more about how they deploy both capital and trusted partnership to reinforce the conditions under which African collaboratives can do their best work.

Acknowledgements

The Bridgespan Group is grateful to those who participated in the survey and agreed to be interviewed to help us better understand the need for additional funding for African collaboratives and what it takes for funders to best support them. The team that developed this article would also like to thank Anna-Maria Mbwette, Fhatuwani Mabila, Khethiwe Mnganga, Amit Nanoo, Alison Powell, Zach Slobig, and Larry Yu.