Claiming Agency: Reflecting on TrustAfrica’s first decade

‘There’s a dignity in influencing your own destiny.’1 The topic of African philanthropy might strike some as abstract. But very real images rise from the pages of this book. In Ghana, a smallholder farmer influences her nation’s agriculture policies. In Liberia, advocates work with officials to make resource extraction more transparent and beneficial to communities. At the African Union, activist researchers advance a new initiative to stem illicit flows of money from the continent. These are just three examples of work supported by TrustAfrica, one of the continent’s few multi-programme, pan-African philanthropic institutions. If you factor in the multitude of similar actions that the foundation has supported over the course of a decade, you get a palpable sense of African agency – people across the continent who have taken it upon themselves to deepen democracy and promote the kind of economic development that benefits all people.