By David Barnard and Tonia Dabwe

Across Africa, the ground beneath civil society is shifting. Grant funding is diminishing, donor priorities are changing, and the organisations that have long depended on external funding are being forced to ask a question many have avoided for years: what happens if the money stops coming?

It took Semerian Sankori three years to find the courage to act. Not because she lacked the idea, and not because her organisation, Patinaai Osim, lacked the skills. The Maasai women she works with in Kajiado County, Kenya, were already gifted beaders and tailors. “I had the fear of starting,” she admitted during a recent NGO Power Talk webinar, hosted by @AfricanNGOs and Hexa Media Africa. “How are we going to get the capital to start? How do I register it?”

More than 800 people registered for the webinar. That number tells an important story. The fear Semerian described is not unique to her. It is close to universal across the African NGO sector, and it deserves attention and recognition: moving from a grant-funded model to a social enterprise model feels like stepping off solid ground.

That discomfort is expected. Grant funding, whatever its frustrations, is familiar. You know the rules, you write the proposal, you report against the indicators, you wait for the next cycle. A social enterprise requires something different. It asks you to take responsibility for outcomes nobody can guarantee, in a market you may not yet understand, with resources you are not sure you have.

The funding environment no longer affords African NGOs the luxury of staying with the familiar. Grant funding is shrinking, and donor priorities are shifting. Nobody is coming to rescue organisations that wait this out.

Most NGOs face a critical choice: they can either change on their own terms or wait until change is forced upon them during a crisis.

The encouraging takeaway from this second NGO Power Talk webinar on income diversification in the African NGO sector is that the shift does not require inventing something entirely new. The moderator, Tonia Dabwe, framed a social enterprise simply as a business that uses its profits to do good, and set out a few different forms it can take: sometimes the income-generating activity is the mission itself; sometimes it extends an existing programme into new territory; and sometimes it exists as a genuinely separate commercial entity that channels its profits back to the cause. None of these is inherently superior. What matters is starting from what you already have.

That was the thread running through every panellist’s story. 

Patinaai Osim did not invent a new skill for the Maasai women it works with. It built on their existing beading and tailoring skills and found buyers through a tourism company already active in the area, supplying it with bags, uniforms and cultural experiences for visitors travelling through Amboseli. The organisation now runs an eighty-twenty profit split, with eighty per cent going to the women who make the products and twenty per cent reinvested into the wider programme. It has also stopped offering free cultural sessions and now charges visiting tourists US$10 per hour, with proceeds split between the community elder delivering the session and the organisation. The balance is deliberate: most of the value stays with the community, and the organisation’s own return is modest.

Celdar Foundation, working with vulnerable farming and micro-enterprise communities in Ghana, followed a similar logic. Rather than launching something unfamiliar, it built a revolving loan fund around the agricultural training it already delivered, letting beneficiaries borrow against a small service fee to invest in their own small businesses. The fee helps cover the cost of capital, any losses, and the administration associated with it. Celdar’s Executive Director, John Obuaba, was blunt about what made it work: a business mindset, not a donor mindset. “We don’t have to think about setting up and waiting for someone to bring us money,” he said. “The way a business person looks for money to invest in a company, that is the same way we need to think.”

Ubuntu Pathways, operating in Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, took the more structurally separate route. During the height of load-shedding, the organisation identified a real and urgent community need for reliable, affordable energy. It partnered with an established gas supplier to launch EconoGas as a separate legal entity, with its own board and accountability lines. Proceeds from the company help fund Ubuntu Pathways’ healthcare, education, and job creation programmes. EconoGas sits alongside Ubuntu Pathways’ consultancy arm and an endowment fund, all of which are designed to eventually fund the organisation’s core cradle-to-career programmes.

And Nguzo Africa Community Foundation, working on environmental restoration in Kenya, started from something it was already doing. It now sells seedlings to community members – more than 100,000 to date – generating income directly tied to its conservation mission while extending its reach. It also promotes and supports value addition across various products in the dairy, coffee, poultry and beekeeping sectors, and is developing credit facilities and extension support services for farmers. 

Another thread running through all of these stories is a question that resurfaces in NGO circles, often as an unspoken assumption rather than a stated fear: can we really ask vulnerable communities to pay for what we offer? The panellists pushed back hard on this. 

Ubuntu Pathways found that when their gas prices rose slightly above a competitor’s, driven by global oil price shifts, customers stayed loyal anyway, because they trusted where the money was going and the accountability that trust created. Celdar Foundation found that community members were more than willing to pay a small service fee once they understood how it would benefit them. Nguzo Africa offers community members something they would buy anyway, with additional benefits such as reduced transportation costs and time savings. 

Nobody objected. If anything, charging fairly gave the relationship more integrity, not less.

None of this happened without deliberate attention to governance. The webinar opened with the key risk the audience highlighted in the previous webinar: that once an organisation turns its attention to making money, its attention drifts from the mission and the people the organisation was established to serve.

The panellists discussed their strategies for managing this risk. Each organisation represented has set clear boundaries, including separate boards, written policies and clear reporting lines to ensure that the pursuit of income does not change the mission they are meant to fulfil. As John Obuaba stated, “The moment you stop minimising that risk is the moment you risk becoming just a for-profit entity.”

None of the panellists described a smooth start. What they consistently highlighted was a decision to begin with what was already in front of them: a skill their community already had, a need already visible, and a partner already nearby. As Semerian Sankori eventually put it, once she got past the fear, “it was just timing, and just believing in ourselves.”

For African NGOs considering this shift, the most important takeaway is this: you don’t need a business degree, a large capital investment, or a perfect plan. What you need is to honestly assess what your organisation already possess and the conviction to stop waiting for permission to take action.

This article builds on an earlier piece by David Barnard from the May 2026 NGO Power Talk webinar, “Income Diversification in the African NGO Sector: Strategic Imperatives, Risks and Opportunities,” which explores the broader case for why African NGOs need to diversify their income.

(David Barnard is the Founder of @AfricanNGOs and the African NGO Fundraising Hub, and co-host of the NGO Power Talk webinar series.

Tonia Dabwe is a Liberian-Dutch strategy and organisational advisor with over 20 years’ experience across the private, public and non-profit sectors. She focuses on organisational development, governance, and financial sustainability and is the Founder of SoVenture and the Mineke Foundation in Liberia.)