I came into the development sector as a very passionate person. That passion drove my career from the entry level to various senior roles, and I rose to eventually manage one of the big international organisations as Country Director, where I was responsible for all country operations.
The role came with many privileges and a lot of status. I got access to high-level meetings not only in Tanzania where I am based, but also around the world. And people saw me as an employer, with a large staff to support me and a big budget to spend. From this, I got a lot of respect and access to a luxurious life.
I lived this kind of life for a long time until I started questioning myself about the reality and contradictions of it. I realized that this life was not a reflection of who I felt I was, based on where I came from.
I was aware of what was happening in the community I grew up in, and the challenges they faced. I felt like I was standing far from them and far from the reality of my people. My status in international aid had distanced me from the community; I was standing very high, but my community was standing “very low”, and it didn’t feel good.
At the same time, I began to feel internally disturbed by the programs I was running for the international organisation. Some programs were not clear, and many of them were not sustainable if the funder ever pulled out. Having read different books, I could see how aid had conditioned us into dependence.
For the first time, I started to wonder whether this was the life I wanted to pursue.
Creating an Alternative
Around this time, I started to reflect on what we truly needed in development.
I saw the need to create a community willing to lead its development with little, if any, external support. A community confident in its ability to solve its problems without always waiting for other people.
I started sharing these ideas with a group of friends, and we got talking about how we could make African communities stand on their own. We decided to start an organisation to change people’s mindset. So in 2014, we established Thubutu Africa Initiatives, and started operations two years later.
Thubutu Africa Initiatives is an NGO that works to empower women and youth to have more access to and control over resources, opportunities, and decision-making power. When we launched Thubutu, I was still employed by the big international organization. But in 2017, I felt that I could not keep on working with them and resigned. Normally, when one resigns from a job, people expect that you are moving to another job. Many people wondered ‘Where is Jonathan going to go?’ and what my next job would be.
When I announced that I was joining the community organisation that I helped found, as the director, many people said, “Jonathan is out of his mind.” I had moved from a position with a lot of money, to a startup with no clear prospects. They thought something had gone wrong with me.
This was when I started to lose my respect and status.
Expectations and Frustrations
The first sign of losing my respect was that I was no longer someone who got consulted on international development issues.
The second was with the community that I was working in. The communities had been conditioned into a system where you go into a community, they have a problem, and you “solve” it. I had moved from driving big organisational cars to driving a small personal car. They became aware that I no longer had the big money that came with my previous employer.
There were also moments when I felt the pressure to go back to my INGO job especially because I also had the pressure of supporting my family. It was hard on them because the privileges we had enjoyed were gone, and I also started to worry about money.
Finally, I had assumed that some of my INGO contacts would support the organisation I founded, but many did not respond to my emails.
I started to feel I had made a big mistake in trying to do community-led work. At this point I focused on trying to bring in money to the organisation, and I lost my focus on the work. We managed to get small amounts, but the small amounts caused us to compromise the mission. At this point I started to lose respect for myself.
Out of frustration from dealing with international organisations, I turned to the community. I had been the person who had solved their problems with money, then I became the person telling them, “Let’s mobilise whatever resources we have.” When I explained how community philanthropy works, some were disappointed, and they never came back again. I was struggling between the ideology of community philanthropy and putting it to people whose mindset had been conditioned into donor dependence.
During this time, I questioned why international organisations talk about supporting locally based organizations though the reality is different. I had known there are intermediary international organizations receiving money deciding which organizations on the ground get funded. I knew it was in the interest of international organisations to say we don’t have capacity. They must position themselves as people who have the capacity at the expense of locally based organizations so they (intermediaries) can continue to have access to funding.
However, I felt I had gotten into community work at a time when that politics was over and behind us. I was shocked to learn that whenever I introduced myself as a locally based organization, we were taken for granted. We were told we could only manage small amounts. They argued that we did not have capacity because we were an “early stage” organisation. My previous experience as an INGO country head was dismissed.
When I introduced myself as a locally based organization, we were taken for granted. We were told we could only manage small amounts.
Many years later we managed to get community members to contribute to our work. In one case, they came together to offer their labour to build a girls’ toilet at a school that had no toilet. People in the community have told me they are proud to have contributed to their development as opposed to simply being “watchers” of projects being implemented by people outside the community.
A Larger Community
While I was going through this, I did not realize others around the world were also thinking the same thing.
When I first heard the word “community philanthropy”, I didn’t understand it. Even though that was the practice of how we were trying to mobilise resources, the term was not familiar to me. It wasn’t until I attended the #ShiftThePower symposium in London, that I met people there and I felt – this is what I have been thinking of. I was surprised, and happy that I was not alone. I met people there who have stayed friends with me to this date.
To this day, I am still surprised that there are people who are supporting it, because of how hard it was in the beginning. I still know there are people in international development who don’t understand or believe in the idea of communities as co-funders to their development issues.
For people that have been socialised in international development, the path to community philanthropy is like the process of refining gold. At some point, after all the extraction you must burn it and put it into fire so that you can get the very fine gold. Once it is out of the fire, the value will be increased, and it will be valued by customers in the market.
For people that have been socialised in international development, the path to community philanthropy is like the process of refining gold. Once it is out of the fire, the value will be increased.
That is how I see community philanthropy. You have to separate “yourself from yourself.” You have to redefine who you are and who you want to be and take the decision of who you want to be.
I am happy to say that today, I have regained my respect in the community – and it’s a different kind of respect. I feel sorry for my colleagues who are working in big organisations because they are still seen as outsiders and do not have the respect that I do as a co-founder along with communities.
Jonathan Kifunda is the Executive Director of the Thubutu Africa Initiatives, and is based in Tanzania
