This 9th edition of The Ubuntu Spotlight arrives as East Africa’s philanthropic architecture undergoes fundamental recalibration. Donor retrenchment, fiscal constraint, and shifting geopolitical priorities are forcing a reckoning: institutions built on external dependency must now design for endurance. This issue documents that transition.
Central to this edition is EAPN’s regional study on the volume of giving in East Africa, executed in partnership with the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. For the first time, we are quantifying the scale, direction, and impact of domestic and cross-border capital flows across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. This is not data collection. It is systems intelligence. By surfacing what has been structurally invisible, we position East African philanthropy as a legitimate variable in development finance planning, policy architecture, and fiscal forecasting.
This October, EAPN convenes two strategic interventions: The Endowment Thinking Workshop and the Resilience by Enterprise Series. Both address the sustainability crisis facing mission-driven institutions. The first explores long-term capital preservation as institutional infrastructure. The second examines mission-aligned revenue generation as strategic autonomy. Whether through patient capital or earned income, the mandate is identical: African institutions must control their resource base, not merely access it.
This edition also profiles member institutions advancing this work across the region. Their strategies, ranging from governance innovation to blended finance experimentation, reflect the distributed intelligence shaping the sector’s evolution. These are not case studies. They are blueprints.
As we move into the final quarter of 2025, the question before the sector is no longer whether transformation is necessary. It is whether we will design it deliberately or endure it reactively. EAPN exists to ensure the former.
Evans Okinyi
CEO, East Africa Philanthropy Network
