Local leaders and institutions have the expertise and inherent capacities to solve their problems and help humanity address the world’s most pressing systemic challenges. However, they need grant and investor capital, accompaniment, trust, time, and control to effect transformational change. The NEID-TPI’s Symposium, Innovations in International Philanthropy, brought together a cadre of practitioners across philanthropy and impact investment to share critical practices and discuss issues and solutions on how we get to impact through a justice framework.

The Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19 pandemic shed renewed light on longstanding patterns of structural inequities, their racialised natures, and outcomes for people of colour globally. They showcased the power, brilliance, and leadership of people of colour at the frontlines of racial, economic, gender, environmental and political justice efforts through local institutions and movements to solve complex issues in tested and novel ways. In international development, there is a tacit understanding that local actors of colour understand their context far better than the best-prepared international organisations and are the most effective and efficient in responding to pressing needs. It is thus a no-brainer that the localisation of decision-making power and the resources to implement deliberately, and at scale are sine qua non conditions for transformational change across all justice areas.

However, the data is conclusive.

Over 99 percent of humanitarian and philanthropic funding goes to white-led NGOs, less than 2 percent goes to local NGOs, and 95 percent of philanthropic wealth is concentrated in Europe and North America, Those patterns are consistent across investment management. In her panel talk at the NEID-TPI Symposium, Rachel Robasciotti of Adasina reminded us that 99 per cent of investment management was still white and male-owned, and Amy Brakeman of the Umsizi Fund admonished us in her speaker comments to shift this paradigm. She said we need to urgently shift wealth and control to proximal leaders at the frontline of change.

Read the full article about proximity in partnerships by Dana Nau François at Alliance Magazine.