Insights

Return on Investment. I remember clearly the moment I heard that term for the first time within the NPO space. I was sitting opposite a funding committee and while looking at our operational budget, one of the committee members explained the importance of return on investment in their decision-making.  That got me thinking: What is the return on investment when investing in the work of NP...

The Independent Philanthropy Association of South Africa (IPASA) is proud to unveil its fifth edition of the Annual Review of South African Philanthropy.  In the Annual Review, IPASA showcases prominent philanthropic organisations and their efforts towards addressing the pressing challenges facing the country. This year's focus is on how collaboration, leadership and sustainable innovatio...

Neighbourhood Old Age Homes (NOAH) recently opened the All-Day Corner Café (cnr Essex & Regent Streets, Woodstock). The café is the result of a unique collaboration between NOAH and the trendy Gardens café and pub, ROXY Late Night. The venture launched in October 2023, and according to NOAH Director, Jane Mills, represents “a significant step towards empowering our residents and youth, and...

By Mary-Anne Gontsana. Photos by Ashraf Hendricks.The biggest dog, the best look-alike, the cutest, the most unusual dog, the best dressed owner and dog, the shiniest coat, the cutest trick, the best behaved, and the smallest dog – these were the prize categories in a friendly competition to celebrate Khayelitsha’s Mdzananda Animal Clinic turning 27 on Saturday (07 October 2023). The...

Every first Saturday of the month, small-scale farmers, producers and artisans gather outside of Gordon’s Gym in Mowbray to sell their locally grown produce, homemade foods and handmade goods at the Mowbray Market. This new addition to the market landscape in Cape Town was first launched in December 2022 by the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE) together with rural movements suc...

BackaBuddy, South Africa's leading donations-based crowdfunding platform, is reshaping the landscape of online fundraising with an announcement that promises to elevate the efforts of registered non-profit organisations nationwide.  Effective immediately, BackaBuddy is launching a 0% platform fee for registered non-profit organisations utilising the plat...

By Liezl HumanPhotos: Ashraf Hendricks A few hundred caregivers, teachers, parents, and children attended the Wordworks Early Literacy Festival on 16 September. The event highlighted early literacy and language development. Many of the participants came from communities on the Cape Flats such as Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha, Grassy Park, Philippi and Elsies River. In May 2023, the Progre...

 #Classifieds is a dynamic platform designed to bridge the gap between nonprofit organisations and skilled service providers. South African nonprofits now have a dedicated space to discover and connect with professionals who can assist them in their critical work. Conversely, experienced nonprofit service providers can showcase their expertise, helping nonprofits achieve their mission-dri...

With just under half of young South Africans between the ages of 15 and 34 without any learning or earning opportunities, interventions addressing this crisis are often caught between expanding reach and achieving real impact. The Basic Education Employment Initiative (BEEI) is a case in point. Born out of the Presidential Employment Stimulus, the BEEI was launche...

The civil society sector provides space for individuals to work with others and become active citizens. People come together, not necessarily to benefit themselves and make money, but to achieve change in society.   We live in a rapidly changing society and the days of starting at the bottom of a business and slowly rising to the top are long past. When people look for work, they tend ...

By Mary-Anne Gontsana, GroundUp NewsPhotos: Mary-Anne Gontsana Gugulethu Chess College founder Babalwa Rubusana goes from class to class at Luzuko Primary School, collecting learners on the under-11 chess team. Founded in 2016 and aimed at young children, the college is a no-fee mobile chess school for learners from disadvantaged households. In one classroom, we saw several grade ...

By Stephen Davis and William Mattingly Charged with creating ‘as large a picture as possible’ of human rights violations that occurred during the last three and a half decades of apartheid, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) amassed an extraordinarily large archive. Much of this archive consisted of hearing transcripts which were stored on a legacy website ho...

By Roseisha Ishwardutt, The Unlimited Child The Unlimited Child in partnership with Gift of The Givers, a renowned humanitarian organization, is thrilled to announce the launch of a ground-breaking pilot program that will bring The Unlimited Child's world-class Early Childhood Development (ECD) blueprint and program to Yemeni refugee camps. This innovative collaboration aims to make a transfor...

Residents living in the N2 Gateway social housing project flats in Langa have turned dumpsites on empty land into three thriving vegetable gardens. Spinach, cabbages, kale, potatoes, onions, turnips, beetroot, pepper, peas, tomatoes, butternut, carrots, brinjal, sweet potatoes are grown as well as parsley, rosemary lavender, and fennel. The first resident to start a garden, in 2019, ...

On 16 May 2023, the same day that the shocking PIRLS literacy results were released, IPASA kicked off its Collaboration in Philanthropy series with the aim of facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration to effectively drive dramatic change to the current reality we face. The recently announced 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) finding that 81% of grade 4 learners i...

Wandisa Phama is the incoming Executive Director of the Centre for Environmental Rights. An admitted attorney and human rights activist, with over a decade of experience in various roles in the public interest law sector, she is passionate about advancing social justice.  What inspired you to pursue a career in public interest environmental law? I tend to approach the question in a broad...

The South African education system is characterised by copious challenges and inadequacies that perpetuate the ongoing education crisis.  The results of the 2021 Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) confirmed that learning losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic are severe across South Africa.  The PIRLS report is an international assessment that focuses on mea...

On the pavement between small businesses in the busy street of Lerotholi Avenue in Langa is a large statue of a woman, made out of grass, stone, mud and clay. Inside, is Langa’s first art gallery, 16 on Lerotholi. The statue is by artist Angus Taylor. The gallery, founded by four young people from Langa, officially opened its doors in 2019. “Langa is known for the arts, so there was a n...

People in South Africa are used to reports of organisations like Gift of the Givers stepping in during humanitarian emergencies or service delivery NGOs assisting with HIV or tuberculosis programmes. Take, for example, Touws River – a town in the Central Karoo in the Western Cape, with a high rate of unemployment. Residents recently turned to the NGO, Gift of the Givers to help out with health...

Recently Nedbank Private Wealth brought out the fifth edition of The Giving Report (2022) which provides the results of a 2021 survey on the giving practices of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) in South Africa. To qualify as a HNWI, participants required earnings in excess of R1.5-million a year or owned investable assets of more than R5-million, excluding their primary residence – ...

The highly experienced and talented Mammuso Makhanya was originally a beneficiary of an education-based nonprofit organisation. Now, with a Masters in Public Management & Policy and a career that spans the development sector and countries across Africa, she heads up Wordworks, an NGO dedicated to changing lives through literacy. Mammuso talks to Andrea George about the state of the NPOs dur...

Many years ago I worked on a daily radio current affairs show. One of my pet hates was interviewing people from NGOs, because I could never understand what they were talking about. Many organisations were doing amazing work on important issues like housing, health, or education, but when I asked, ‘what do you do?’ they would respond with something like: ‘we are engaging with our stakeholders in...

While most donors make sure they undertake due diligence to ensure the recipients of their funds are ethical, accountable and transparent, it is rare to find a non-profit organisation taking the same trouble to check their donors’ reputations and records. Last month, thanks to the whim of a capricious, privileged wealthy donor, a number of people lost their jobs. Without any engagement with th...

Bright shiny object syndrome: when people focus their attention on an idea that is new and in vogue, but drop this as soon as something new takes its place. This lack-of-focus can cause nonprofits to stray from their core mission, chasing the next philanthropic trend or cause-du-jour. For a variety of reasons, many well-intentioned, nonprofit organisations stray from their original purpose and...

It's 2023, another year filled with overwhelming feelings of hope (and in some instances dread) and the push and pull to be a better version of yourself. I don't know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with New Year and New Year's Resolutions. On the one hand, I feel like there is a clean slate, and a fresh start, and on the other, I can see the mounting expectations that grow as e...

In Nonprofits: We Must Break Out of the Scrappiness Cycle, Vu Le talks about the extremely frugal nature of most nonprofits. “We are always scrimping, trying to find the best deals, trying to get stuff discounted or preferably free. …  It has become a mindset that is ingrained in all of us. It is our donors’ money! We must save! We must be responsible!” And while this is tr...

I wrote previously about the importance of listening if nonprofits want to do a better job of reaching and moving their audiences. However, listening is not only a crucial step in crafting effective messaging. Genuine listening can be hugely persuasive in itself. In his excellent book How Minds Change, David Mcraney describes a campaigning approach called Deep Canvassing, which has repeatedly ...

Too often those of us in the nonprofit world sit in our offices and boardrooms, hashing out messages with our colleagues and allies - people who share our values and think like we do. We argue amongst ourselves for hours over exactly which words and phrases are most correct and precise. And then we wonder why our messages seem ineffective, while our opposition keeps making inroads. Activists, ...

Ever wondered what all the amazing non-profit organisations are in Stellenbosch? Are you interested in supporting local causes? The Stellenbosch Civil Advocacy Network (SCAN), the local umbrella network of non-profits, recently launched a first-of-its-kind web directory for such organisations the Greater Stellenbosch municipal area. It showcases profiles of socio-economic development organisat...

Economic connectedness is not a new concept, but the term is gaining traction thanks to a pair of ground-breaking studies by economists in the US. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and a team of researchers found that cross-class social connections are among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility. Their findings confirm that cross-class friendships expose young ...

Battle lines separate the demand for a universal basic income (UBI) from the hold-out view that the support should be rationed and restricted to those who most “deserve” it. Ranged on one side are civil society organizations, trade unions, academic researchers and sections of the ANC; on the other is organised business and the Treasury. The latter appear to favour an exceedingly...

If storytelling is to be a truly powerful tool for social justice activism, it is important to pay as much attention to the process of storytelling as to its outcome. Unless it is approached thoughtfully and with great care, impact-driven storytelling can easily become transactional and extractive, inflicting some of the very harms it seeks to address.  This is vividly illustrated in a re...

I registered Hashtag Nonprofit as a cause on ShopDonation and tested their system. Here is what I found.  What is ShopDonation? ShopDonation is a website that uses affiliate marketing, where online retailers pay commissions for referrals, to raise money for causes registered on their system. Shopping at the online shops registered with ShopDonation results in a percentage of th...

Thoughtful and clear communication can sharpen ideas and activate calls to action. But this requires us to be conscious of our language and the phrases that we popularise, because words that are intended as calls for social change can easily be restrung to subdue our brave ideas and quiet our most urgent social needs. There was a fleeting moment during the height of the pandemic when our colle...

South Africa has a wealth of organisations that are involved in the education space and philanthropy recognises that until we fix education, most progress is hindered. It is a well-known fact that corporate social investment and private philanthropy in South Africa are heavily invested in education at all levels. This is not accidental, but is based on strategic decisions on what needs to be...

Social impact organisations’ engagement with the UN’s sustainable development goals is critical since their agendas are ultimately the same. While the Covid-19 pandemic rages, we often focus all our attention on surviving the day-to-day struggles while neglecting crucial global long-term goals. One specific such set is the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN&...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across three different reports observing that the course of the Covid-19 pandemic does not follow our expectations for how a story should play out. All three suggest that this narrative failure partly explains the difficulty in mounting a unified public response to the virus.   In the first piece, Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic  explains...

Why should non-profit organisations be expected to operate any differently to private businesses when it comes to covering overheads? Increasingly, philanthropic funders are building into their grants a cushion for funding operating expenses – and this is the right way to go. In 2013 a new TED talk by Dan Pallotta burst onto the non-profit and philanthropy scene. Entitled The Way we Think...

Watching tragedy unfold in Ukraine, I have been thinking about the powerful, rapid, and often unexpected impact that major, shocking events can have on narratives that underpin our understanding of the world. While narrative and culture change work tends to take years, events have the power to bring about rapid change, often in unexpected ways.  In 2011 the Fukushima nuclear disaster ...

UX means “user experience” and refers to designing and creating products with the user in mind. With nonprofits, this can refer to how a user experiences your organisation via your website. For example, let’s imagine that someone hears about your organisation through a social media post, and they decide to visit your website to find out more about you. What would their experience be? Does your...