Scores of local and international community organisations and their representatives have gathered at the Sandton Hotel for the three-day Masana wa Afrika conference, which kicked off with the launch of a funding partner programme on Tuesday.
Led by a team in South Africa and Uganda, Masana wa Afrika provides grants and capacity-strengthening support to community-based organisations whose sole mandate is to provide critical services to children and families across Africa.
In 2023, Masana wa Afrika moved away from ELMA’s Community Grants Program which, since 2012, had supported over 130 community-based organisations, over half of which support children with special needs.
ELMA Philanthropies provides philanthropic advisory services to The ELMA Group of Foundations.
Now with an added mandate to facilitate not only funding part long-term collaborations and partnerships with Community-based Organisations (CBOs), officials from Masana wa Afrika engaged in a series of discussions on how CBOs can benefit from partnerships with the funders.
Bernadette Moffat, the board chairperson at Masana wa Afrika, stressed the importance of a two-way communication and partnership between CBOs and funding partners.
“We are not an institution that only writes cheques and do EFTs. That is not what we are about. We are about trying to make the child seen by the community and community leaders so that the child can be assisted.
“My only hope is that Masana continues to listen to the leaders of the community and the children of those communities. We should always be challenging ourselves to hear and listen to everyone who needs to be heard and listened to,” said Moffat.
Nthbeleng Lephoto, director of Touching Tiny Lives, a community organisation based in Lesotho, said that it took her more than eight years to finally be confident in the work that she did - taking care of little ones and finding donors and partners who care enough to walk the journey with those intending to make a difference in the lives of children.
“We are one of the first beneficiaries through ELMA over 22 years ago. When we met ELMA we were only 8 years old as an organisation. I did not know what I was doing as we were still trying to figure things out including how to approach donors, but through the partnership with ELMA we succeeded as no one tells you why your funding proposals failed, but it was different with ELMA,” Lephoto said of her experience as a community organisation.
In addition to providing general operating support to community-based organisations, Masana wa Afrika - which boasts more than 100 CBOs - offers support to its grantee partners in areas of financial management, governance, organisational development, programming, communications, measurement and evaluation, and fundraising.
The Star