In June 2025, Azimuth World Foundation participated in the 9th East Africa Philanthropy Conference in Kigali, Rwanda, alongside Richard Ntakirutimana and Alex Ahimbisibwe, executive directors of AIMPO and BIDO, respectively. Our Africa Program Officer, Jacque Macharia, represented Azimuth.

Over 500 organizations from 35 countries gathered to examine how philanthropy can adapt to rapid global change. The conference theme, “Agile Philanthropy,” aligned with Azimuth’s work moving philanthropy from dependency toward interdependency.

Sessions explored questions central to our approach: How do we move from donor-driven projects to community-designed initiatives? How do we ensure communities create rather than just receive development work? How do we ensure communities define development for themselves?

The Problem with Imposed Solutions

Alex shared a stark example of how projects fail when communities aren’t included in design. A development organization brought an agricultural project to his community without consultation.

“We kept raising questions: ‘Do you think this is the one that is going to develop our communities? Why can’t you come and sit with us? Let us tell you what we think can help us develop rather than just bringing this project, which we think cannot work.’”

The organization’s response revealed the power dynamic at play: “We are an organization. We design and decide what you want because the money belongs to us.” The project lasted one month before disappearing entirely.

This failure illustrates why most development projects don’t survive beyond initial funding cycles. When communities have no ownership over project design, they have no investment in making projects work. The community becomes a passive recipient rather than an active creator, guaranteeing that local knowledge, context, and motivation get ignored.

Without community buy-in from the start, projects collapse the moment external support disappears.

Richard identified a similar pattern in his own work: “I can see that sometimes we are still following the agenda, the commitment of donors, when implementing and building a project.”

This recognition points to how even Indigenous-led organizations can get pulled into donor-driven approaches when funding comes with predetermined outcomes.

Designing Community-Led Metrics

Richard’s insights into impact measurement highlighted another crucial gap: “When we are collecting data from participants in AIMPO’s projects, do we measure our impact through a system designed by ourselves? I think we are still missing such a system.”

This observation cuts to the heart of who controls the definition of success. Current development practice forces communities to prove their worth using metrics designed by outsiders.

A community might define success as strengthened cultural practices, improved relationships between generations, or increased collective decision-making capacity. But they’re often required to report on metrics like “number of people trained” or “percentage increase in income” instead.

When communities design their own success metrics, they can track what actually matters to their long-term well-being. This means measuring cultural preservation alongside economic indicators, tracking social cohesion alongside individual outcomes, and evaluating community agency alongside service delivery.

Community-designed metrics also create accountability systems that communities themselves can monitor and adjust over time.

Trust-Based Philanthropy in Practice

Sessions on trust-based philanthropy resonated with both leaders’ work in Batwa communities, where years of exclusion from decision-making have created deep distrust not just of external interventions, but of their own capacity for effective decision-making.

This erosion of confidence in community wisdom represents one of colonialism’s most damaging legacies. When outside experts consistently override local knowledge, communities can internalize the message that their own thinking isn’t valuable.

Trust-based philanthropy requires rebuilding confidence in community decision-making while providing flexible support for community-led solutions.

For Alex, attending his first conference of this scale confirmed BIDO’s community-centered approach while highlighting growth areas: “It confirmed the approach we are taking with our communities at the moment, but also made me reflect on things we can still improve to make sure that the community is truly empowered to envision its future.”

Real community empowerment means communities control not just project implementation, but project vision, timeline, and evaluation criteria. It means funding follows community priorities rather than donor interests, and that communities have the resources and authority to change direction when they learn something new.

Addressing Interconnected Challenges

Richard emphasized why isolated project approaches fail: “We have so many interconnected issues. If you just work on one issue, you end up failing because of so many issues around.”

This understanding challenges the project-based funding model that dominates development work. Communities don’t experience “water issues” separate from “education issues” or “health issues.” A family dealing with contaminated water also faces economic stress, health problems, time constraints that affect children’s schooling, and social tensions over resource access.

Effective support requires flexible, long-term funding that allows communities to address connected challenges as they arise. This might mean a water project that also includes conflict resolution training, or an education initiative that incorporates traditional ecological knowledge and economic development.

Communities need the freedom to respond to the whole picture rather than artificial project boundaries.

Building Networks and Capacity

The networking opportunities proved valuable. Richard connected with organizations across Tanzania, Kenya, and Burundi, establishing potential partnerships for AIMPO’s ceramic water filter project. For Alex, the experience expanded his understanding of the broader development landscape while building confidence in BIDO’s approach.

The conference also highlighted gaps in how the development sector engages with Indigenous communities, often without necessary cultural sensitivity. Many sessions discussed “community engagement” without Indigenous voices present, or addressed “local ownership” through non-Indigenous intermediary organizations.

Both Richard and Alex identified five key topics to bring back to their community work. The conversations that began in Kigali continue informing our approach, reminding us that effective philanthropy requires financial resources, deep listening, genuine partnership, and commitment to Indigenous leadership and self-determination.

But most importantly, these conversations confirmed what both leaders already knew: their communities hold the solutions to their own challenges.

The role of external support is to provide resources and remove obstacles, not to design solutions or define success.