The Resources Were Always There, The Question Is Who Controls Them
African feminist movements have spent decades doing something harder: building durable, community-rooted resistance in contexts where backlash was never subtle to begin with. Funded in significant part by conservative forces in the US and Europe, the global anti-rights movement has found fertile ground across the continent, but it has also met its match. From Nigeria to Kenya to South Africa, feminist collectives have developed organising models that are decentralised by necessity, intersectional by instinct, and fluent in the specific terrain they’re working within.
Before the term feminist organising existed in global philanthropic vocabulary, African women were already doing it. They were meeting in community spaces, pooling personal resources, showing up door to door, and holding each other through crisis. This is not a romanticised history. It is the material foundation on which every movement I know was built.
African feminist organising is rooted in Ubuntu: community, solidarity, and mutual support. These values did not arrive with Western institutions or NGO frameworks. They predate them. What modern philanthropy often calls innovative or community-led are principles that African feminist movements have practiced for generations, long before they were legible to funders.
So when I am asked whether the global feminist funding landscape has meaningfully shifted, my honest answer is: not enough. Not nearly enough.
Rebrand is not the same as redistribution
Gender justice has been folded into philanthropic language. It appears in mission statements, in strategy documents, in the names of funds. But language is not money, and visibility is not power. When budget cycles tighten, gender justice and feminist organising are consistently the first areas cut. They remain at the periphery of global philanthropic priorities, even as they are placed at the centre of the branding.
We have also seen what happens when major donors enter “wait and see” mode. Movements do not get to wait and see. Communities in crisis need interventions now. The restrategising of philanthropic institutions or donor paralysis does not pause the violence, the displacement, or the economic precarity that African feminist organisers are responding to every single day.
There is also the subtler pressure: the ask to “wash down” feminist language. To make it more palatable. To strip away the political edge. But that edge is not rhetorical excess. It is the thing that makes structural transformation possible. Remove it, and you are left with programming that addresses symptoms while leaving systems intact.
Discard the assumptions. Start with the people.
If philanthropic institutions genuinely want to learn from African movements, the first requirement is simple and also radical: discard all assumptions. The image of African feminist organising that circulates in global spaces is largely constructed from media, from online information, from secondhand narratives. It does not reflect the lived experience, the indigenous knowledge, or the actual sophistication of movements on the ground.
This is why documentation matters. We need to resource the capturing and sharing of African feminist knowledge, frameworks, and models on our own terms, not as input for external research agendas, but as a body of knowledge that stands in its own right and informs how global collaboration happens.
African feminist philanthropy, for instance, was self-resourced long before named donors arrived. Communities created collective care systems, tontines, rotating funds, communal labor arrangements. These are not informal workarounds. They are sophisticated models for resourcing solidarity and collective care. When the NGOisation of civil society arrived, it pulled many movements away from these practices, orienting them instead toward grant cycles and donor timelines. We lost something important in that shift, and we should name it.
Communities know what they need. Fund accordingly.
One of the things I am rarely asked, but believe is central to this conversation, is this: what do communities already know they need? Because the knowledge is there. It exists on the ground, in feminist networks across the continent, in the organisers who have been navigating these systems for decades. The role of philanthropy is not to define the agenda. It is to resource it.
That means moving away from project-specific, top-down programming and toward core flexible funding. It means trusting movements to make decisions about their own resources. And it means going further: investing in models that allow movements to generate their own income, to own assets, to build financial independence that does not collapse every time a donor restrategises.
Gender lens investing is one avenue. If feminist movements were given core support that they could invest, with returns that flow back into the movement, they would no longer be wholly dependent on the cycles and priorities of external donors. They could build the long-term infrastructure needed not just to survive, but to proactively counter the anti-rights, anti-gender organising that is also being resourced and coordinated globally.
This is not a radical ask. It is a practical one. The resources exist. The question has never been whether there is enough money. The question is who controls it, who it flows to, and on whose terms.
African feminist movements have answered that question with their bodies, their voices, and their decades of unrelenting work. They have built the frameworks, trained the leaders, shifted the laws, and held the line when institutions faltered. They have done this, largely, on a fraction of what is spent on a single global conference. The least we can do is ensure that the women who have always sustained their communities – economically, socially, politically – are the ones who determine what support looks like and how it lands.
The backlash is not a surprise. It is a predictable response to progress. When feminist movements win – when they shift policy, change norms, and mobilise constituencies – those who benefit from the status quo organise to reverse those gains. What is new is the scale, the coordination, and the resourcing of that counter-movement. What is required, then, is an equally coordinated, equally resourced response which is proactive.
This means governments, multilateral institutions, and private philanthropies must be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: are we funding feminism, or are we funding the appearance of feminism? Core, long-term, flexible support to African feminist organisations is not simply the right thing to do. It is the strategically intelligent thing to do for anyone who claims to care about democracy, health, economic development, or peace.
African feminist movements are not waiting to be saved. They are already doing the work. The world’s task is not to lead, but to listen – and then to resource, with trust and without condition, the movements that have always known what freedom requires.
The resources were always there. Now the power must follow.
Writer: Nana Zulu
Editors: Hannah Ajala, Amaka Obioji
Image: Photo by LeeAnn Cline on Unsplash
Nana Zulu is Director of Programs at the African Women's Development Fund (AWDF), where they translate the organisation's strategic framework into programmatic strategies for resourcing women's rights organisations and feminist movements across Africa.