Collective Giving Saved My Brother. Could It Help Sustain Civil Society Too?
About seven years ago, my younger brother went missing after a night out with friends. For five days, my family searched hospitals across Dar es Salaam, hoping he had been admitted somewhere and simply could not reach us. After searching hospitals for 3 days with little success, we started checking morgues. It seemed like the next natural place to look.
I cannot begin to describe the torment you go through when someone you love is missing. The constant shift between hope and dread. You keep hoping for the best, but as the hours pass and every search turns up nothing, the worst possibilities begin to feel less impossible.
After five days of searching hospitals and morgues, we found him. He was at Muhimbili National Hospital. He had been admitted without identification and, because he had lost his memory, he could not tell anyone who he was or how to reach his family.
JAI Muhimbili saves the day
And yet, during those five days, he had not been completely on his own. He had been receiving support from JAI Muhimbili, a group of Muslim individuals who contribute money each day as part of their religious charitable giving. The money is then pooled and used to provide food and other basic support to patients in need at Muhimbili National Hospital.
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What strikes me to this day is how ordinary these contributions are. People give as little as TZS 1,000, TZS 3,000, TZS 5,000 or TZS 20,000. These are amounts that can look insignificant when we talk about funding and philanthropy. But when you have seen what they become, they stop looking small. For my brother, and for many other patients, these contributions become food, care and dignity at a moment of vulnerability.
The Power of Individual & Collective Giving
Whenever conversations about the shrinking funding landscape in philanthropy come up, I think about that experience. I think about how collective giving helped carry my brother through those five days, and how it continues to support patients at Muhimbili every day.
What happened through JAI Muhimbili is not unusual in the way Africans give. We have long pooled money, food, time and other resources to support people around us, even if we have not always called it philanthropy.
Recent research by EPIC-Africa found that 65% of African civil society organisations surveyed receive some form of financial support from individuals. More than half, 53%, specifically reported individual donations as a source of funding, while about 26% reported community-generated funds.
Those numbers matter because they challenge the idea that meaningful philanthropy only happens through large foundations, wealthy donors or institutional grants. A thousand shillings given by one person may not look like much. But when thousands of people give their one thousand, three thousand or five thousand shillings, that money becomes something else entirely.
We see this at scale elsewhere too. In the United States, collective giving groups distributed more than US$3.1 billion between 2017 and 2023. The context is different, but the principle is the same: individual contributions, when pooled, can move serious resources.
Perhaps the opportunity for African philanthropy is not to invent a new culture of giving. It is to recognise, strengthen and organise the one that already exists.
For civil society organisations, this means individual giving should not be treated as a side activity or an emergency fundraising tactic. It needs the same seriousness we give to institutional fundraising: understanding who our supporters are, building relationships with them, making it easy for them to contribute, and showing them clearly what their support makes possible. The amounts may be smaller, but the base of support can be wider, more rooted and, in some cases, more resilient.
There is also something important about what this kind of giving does to our understanding of philanthropy itself. It reminds us that generosity is not the preserve of the wealthy. People do not need to have millions to make a difference. Sometimes the most meaningful giving is simply one person deciding that what they have, however little, can help meet someone else’s need.
