EPIC Africa is a new member of the Worldwide Initiatives For Grantmaker Support (WINGS) community. Co-Founders Rose Maruru and Adwoa Agyeman describe the environment around their work.

The African philanthropy landscape is diversifying, growing and  an exciting space. New actors and ideas are coming into the ecosystem.  Despite the clamping down of civil society space in some countries, governments — across the continent — increasingly recognize that philanthropy is an important contributor to the achievement of the sustainable development goals. Civil society organizations are becoming more creative around tapping into local resources. On the other hand, the support infrastructure remains generally weak. For example, few entities exist to provide advisory services to the sector and to governments, to advocate for an enabling giving environment, provide data and research to guide policy decisions or for focus giving.

Philanthropy support organizations can have a more multi-sectorial approach and greater transparency in working to expand available data on philanthropy. Greater collaboration is needed to develop common standards, language and tools to enable aggregation and comparison. They can also collaborate to push a data movement, especially in the context of enabling the sector to measure its contribution to and impact on the issues it seeks to solve.

Our aim is to increase philanthropic impact by filling critical data and capacity gaps in the philanthropic market infrastructure in Africa. Specifically, EPIC-Africa is establishing an index of African civil society organizations to bring greater visibility to their work and increase their discoverability by those looking to fund African Civil Society Organizations (CSO) initiatives.

Read the full article about EPIC-Africa's role in WINGS at Philanthropy In Focus.