Annual Conference

Theme: "Towards a more Sustainable Civil Society in Africa: Inclusion, Governance, and Impact"

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its shocking effect on the global economy has raised serious questions about the sustainability of Africa’s civil society sector. In October 2020, a joint statement released by the ILO, FAO, IFAD and WHO declared that the economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic had put tens of millions of people at risk of falling into extreme poverty, while the number of undernourished people, estimated at nearly 690 million, could increase by another 132 million by the end of the year. According to the statement, informal economy workers in low, and middle-income countries such as those in Africa were deemed particularly vulnerable because the majority of these nations do not offer their citizens social protections nor access to quality health care, with many having also lost access to productive assets (ILO, 2020).

A June 2020 survey of one thousand and fifteen (1, 015) CSOs across 44 African countries by Epic Africa, found that 98% of participating organizations had their operations impacted and disrupted due to COVID-19 in one or more ways, with 85% of organizations surveyed indicating that they were not prepared to cope with the disruption to their operations. With respect to funding, 56% of the organizations surveyed reported that they had already experienced a loss of funding, while 66% expected to lose funding over the next three to six months.

Historically, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Africa have played a critical role in plugging gaps in government service delivery as well as holding governments and political leaders to account, and ensuring the basic human rights of freedom of expression, association, and the right to freely choose one’s leaders through the ballot box are upheld. But even before the onset of the pandemic, African CSO’s had been facing an array of challenges regarding their sustainability due to changing aid patterns for development (Arhin et al., 2018).

Against the backdrop of the effects of the pandemic on CSO/NGO operations in Africa, and the twin opportunities created by the responsiveness of African CSOs/NGOs to the pandemic which is driving conversations around a shift in North-South philanthropic power relations on one hand, and increased interest by corporates and foundations in the global North in funding minority and ‘Southern’ causes triggered by the death of George Floyd and the global BLM movement that followed on the other, this year’s conference seeks to interrogate and discuss research papers focused on the issues of sustainability, inclusion, governance, and impact at both the organizational and community levels and what addressing these issues portend for the future of Africa’s civil society sector.