By John Gbenagnon, RFLD Regional Development and Strategy Director, and Mary Norkai Dowuona, RFLD Regional Executive Lead
The Africa Philanthropy Network is convening the APN Assembly 2026 in Accra, Ghana, from 2 to 6 November. This year’s theme, “African Philanthropy in Action: Adopt, Advance, Amplify”, captures a process we know well at RFLD: embracing change, driving progress and expanding impact across sectors and disciplines.
As a francophone regranter, we are very excited to be part of this Assembly. It is more than a convening. It is a conversation, and a shared voice, for African philanthropy actors across the continent and its diaspora. APN describes it as an affirmation of its core purpose: to promote voice and action for African philanthropy by creating spaces where philanthropy support organisations and individuals can interrogate, and intervene on, the power dynamics that shape how resources are mobilised, distributed and used.
We share that purpose. What we want to see is a continent where African philanthropy practices, existing and emerging, drive systemic change. This open letter sets out what we, as a French-speaking network and fund, are bringing to Accra, and what we hope our peers will take home with them.
A conversation that must also happen in French
African philanthropy is still discussed mostly in English. Calls for proposals, reporting templates, panels and peer networks tend to work in English first. The organisations that pay the price are those that work in French or in Portuguese. They are often the closest to the communities they serve, and the furthest from the rooms where money is allocated.
We see this every day. RFLD, the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (Women Leaders Network for Development), was founded in 2013. Today it brings together 1,143 member organisations in more than 35 African countries. Most of them are grassroots, women-led groups in French-speaking Africa. They protect survivors of violence, defend women human rights defenders and push for laws that work, often with very little flexible money.
Our report Funding Feminist Movements in Francophone West Africa: 2026 Data, published on 4 October 2026, puts numbers on that experience. It covers eight countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. It finds that funders tend to focus on English-speaking and East African initiatives, and that calls and reporting in English keep many French-speaking groups out before they even apply.
The margins are thin. AWID’s 2025 study found that the median feminist organisation worked with US$22,000 in 2023. A 2022 study commissioned by the Agence française de développement found that 64.4% of feminist organisations surveyed in the Global South had annual budgets under €50,000, and 57% had no institutional funding at all. Myriad USA reports that African-led organisations receive less than 2% of global philanthropy. An Oak Foundation scoping report found that more than 58% of funds intended for Africa still pass through Western intermediaries.
Francophone organisations face a double gap. They feel the global fall in aid, and they also face cuts from their closest partners: France’s aid to women’s rights organisations fell by 71% between 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, according to Focus 2030. Civic space is narrowing at the same time. In October 2026 the CIVICUS Monitor rated five of the eight countries in our report as repressed.
An Assembly that wants to transform the power dynamics of giving needs these organisations in the room, speaking in their own language.
Who we are bringing to Accra
Accra is home ground for us. Our Africa Office is here, and our Francophone Hubs are in Dakar and Porto-Novo. RFLD is attending with a delegation of ten, led by Mary Norkai Dowuona, who coordinates the RFLD Executive Office across our offices in Ghana, Benin, Senegal and The Gambia.
We are also sponsoring delegates from francophone African organisations, one from each of six French-speaking countries. RFLD covers their participation so that cost is not the reason a French-speaking organisation misses this conversation. We are not publishing their names. Some of them work in contexts where visibility carries risk, and RFLD never names or shows a defender at risk without her written consent.
For many of them, this will be the first time they sit at the same table as anglophone grantmakers, diaspora networks and African foundations. The Assembly offers French and English interpretation, which makes this possible. The links built over these days, between English-speaking and French-speaking movements that rarely meet in one place, are part of what we came for.
Adopt: homegrown giving is already the backbone
Day one asks how African communities can adopt homegrown ideas, values and models as the foundation of African philanthropy. The community dialogues cover grassroots and indigenous giving, individual giving across African civil society, liberatory fundraising and youth voice in the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Our members can speak to this from experience. AWID found that 81% of feminist organisations rely on autonomous resourcing such as volunteering, mutual aid, community fundraising and membership fees. In the Sahel and on the coast, women’s groups keep shelters, legal clinics and savings groups going on contributions from their own communities when outside money stops. That is African philanthropy, even when nobody calls it that.
Adopting these practices means recognising them, funding them and learning from them, rather than replacing them with models designed elsewhere. It also means giving African individual donors more ways to give. RFLD has opened new channels for individual donors in Africa and abroad, including our GivingTuesday 2026 campaign, which aims to raise US$1,000,000 to end violence against women in Africa.
Advance: regranting that reaches the francophone grassroots
Day two is about deepening, scaling and investing in what already works across the continent. It closes with a plenary on radical resourcing and what philanthropy can learn from feminist movements. This is where RFLD has the most to share.
Over the past years, RFLD has moved from advocacy alone to funding the movement directly. Through our Africa Grant Portfolio, we made 27 grants worth US$722,100 to 26 organisations between June and September 2026. Ten of those grants, worth US$400,000, went to organisations working with Vulnerable Groups in West Africa that prefer not to be named.
We publish what we give, including our gaps. Our 2026 data report draws on the RFLD grants register: of the 17 grants listed for June to September 2026, 13 support work in francophone West Africa, for a total of US$282,100, about 88% of the money in that register. The same register shows where we have not yet reached. None of those grants went to an organisation in Burkina Faso or Guinea, two countries where civic space is most restricted. We have said publicly that we will report on this gap.
Our West African Feminist Fund (WAFF) is built on what the evidence supports: flexible, multi-year funding delivered through regional intermediaries that know the context. Its Urgent Action window stays open all year, with grants of up to US$5,000 and a decision within five business days. From January 2027, the Africa Grant Portfolio will open to organisations in all 55 African Union member states.
We are also going deeper in one country at a time. In October 2026 RFLD launched Yéego Jigéen (Women Rising), a 36-month programme of flexible regranting and tailored capacity building for grassroots women’s rights organisations in all fourteen regions of Senegal. It is run from our office in Dakar, in French and in national languages, by people who know the regions. It shows what advancing African philanthropy can look like when the intermediary sits close to the groups it funds, and when capacity building is designed with them rather than for them.
A grant alone does not keep an organisation standing. Through the RFLD Organizational Resilience Program, we give member organisations a free management suite and training to run their finances and reporting. Strong systems make it easier for small organisations to receive larger and more flexible funding, and to account for it in the way their communities and their funders expect.
We have also made public commitments that we will bring to the radical resourcing plenary: to publish our grants register every quarter, to keep at least half of each regranting programme in francophone West Africa, and to pair every grant with organisational strengthening.
Amplify: narrative power in more than one language
Day three is about reclaiming and elevating the voice of African philanthropy. One of its community dialogues asks what African feminist movements teach us about building collective narrative power. Another asks how we reclaim the narrative of African giving.
Our contribution is open knowledge. The Maputo Barometer tracks how African states turn the Maputo Protocol into national law and budgets. The Protocol has now been ratified by 46 of the 55 African Union member states, and the next edition of the Barometer will be published on 11 July 2027. Our Académie francophone du RFLD offers free certifying courses on women’s rights and organisational management. These courses are now also open in English and in Portuguese, so that anglophone and lusophone learners can earn the same certificates.
Our Dɔnùesè data centre adds a further layer. It collects and publishes information on women’s rights laws and public policies so that organisations, journalists and decision makers can use the same evidence. When a women’s group in Togo or Niger can show a mayor the law, the budget line and the gap between them, it no longer needs an outside expert to speak for it.
This is one practical answer to the language gap: knowledge that starts in French and travels across the continent. Narrative power is not only about telling our stories well. It is about who owns the data, who publishes it and in which language it can be read.
What we will ask of our peers and funders
Our delegation will carry the recommendations of our 2026 data report to Accra. We will ask funders to commit a share of their gender funding to francophone West Africa and to publish it every year. We will ask for flexible grants of at least three years, with core funding that lets organisations build reserves. We will encourage funding through regional intermediaries and national women’s funds, with their operating costs covered.
Language comes up in every one of these conversations. We will ask funders to accept applications and reports in French and to pay for translation and interpretation. We will also ask for distinct approaches for the Sahel and for coastal states, including support for informal groups and for organisations working from exile, and for reporting rules that do not expose activists to risk.
African philanthropy has a role of its own here. African foundations, family funds and individual givers are growing. They can choose to work in French and Portuguese from the start. They can trust organisations close to communities with flexible money. They can sit on the same boards and panels as the women who run those organisations. Each of these choices shifts power a little closer to where change happens.
An invitation
We come to Accra to listen as much as to speak. We want to learn from Ghana’s philanthropy community, from our East and Southern African peers, and from the Latin American experience that the Assembly will bring into the room. We also come with an offer: RFLD is ready to co-design calls, share our tools and open our network to any African funder that wants to reach the francophone grassroots.
If you are at the Assembly, find our delegation. If you are a funder who has never supported a French-speaking organisation, let this be the year you start. If you lead a francophone organisation and could not travel, know that your voice is in the room through the delegates we sponsored, and that we will report back to you.
After the Assembly, the sponsored delegates will return home with new contacts and commitments. We will follow up with each of them, and we will publish what changed. Adopt, advance, amplify: in Accra and in every language our movements speak.
Find out more about RFLD’s grants, data and free courses at rflgd.org. To partner with us, write to admin@rflgd.org. #APNAssembly2026 #GivingAndPower
