The African Giving Narratives Project seeks to house the most comprehensive web resource on global generosity practices, recognizing generosity’s full richness and diversity across time and space. In its revised phase, led by Giving Tuesday Data Commons and supported by the National Philanthropic Trust (NPT), this initiative offers one step toward achieving these goals. Currently, the African Giving Narratives Project has a collection of 200 preliminary articles from across the globe, with 20 undergoing revision by NPT. These articles have been crafted by a mix of scholars, consultants, and contributors from the Giving Tuesday network in line with an established Style Guide.   

Central to the revised African Giving Narratives Project vision is that those who live the experience are best placed to define and lead it.  

To realize this idea, TrustAfrica, in collaboration with Giving Tuesday, is embarking on an exciting journey to highlight and celebrate African voices, narratives, and philanthropic traditions. The initiative seeks to dive deeper into the stories, practices and traditions that capture the true spirit of African generosity. Global philanthropy research often paints a uniform picture of African giving, with generalizations that fail to capture the diversity, nuance, and depth of giving narratives (and aligned traditions and practices) that have stood at the core of African communities for centuries. These narratives we seek to profile contribute to debunking stereotypes and biases, offering a more authentic portrayal and understanding of giving on the continent.   This initiative is funded by Giving Tuesday and TrustAfrica. 

OBJECTIVE 

The primary objective of this project is to: 

1. To challenge existing stereotypes and create a platform that places African giving at the center of global conversations.  
2. Collaborate with diverse contributors across the continent to develop content offering their perspectives and insights on African philanthropic practices. 
3. To represent and shed light on the rich traditions and narratives of African giving.  
4. Integrate the developed contents into the African Giving Narratives Project
5. Channel contributions to the TrustAfrica African Giving knowledge hub and the “Reimagining Feminist & Pan-African Philanthropies’ knowledge repository, a joint initiative of TrustAfrica and Urgent Action Fund-Africa. 

Over the next few months, from October 2023 to January 2024, we are undertaking a pilot project to source and collate 20 articles covering different aspects of African generosity, particularly on indigenous narratives, practices, and traditions. 

This initiative is being explored by TrustAfrica and Giving Tuesday as a pilot project. This pilot will serve as a basis for Giving Tuesday exploring further partnerships in other geographic regions to highlight giving narratives within those. There is also a possibility of expanding the pilot in Africa to a larger scale project.