African Collaborative

14/10/2026

The past few weeks have been full of time with our partners, from Kenya to Ghana.

It was a joy to spend a morning with the PRICHO team while they were in town.

Swipe through for more moments from these visits.

Doris and Julie joined Nice Place Foundation at their headquarters to celebrate five years, and to cheer on this year’s graduating girls.

Congratulations to the whole Nice Place community!

Nafi and Chamrid caught up with Jeph from Blossom Academy at WACSI’s Africa at the Center convening in Accra. While there, Chamrid served as an expert panelist for the innovation pitching session and Nafi joined a fireside dialogue on what is limiting African-led development from thriving.

Nafi and Chamrid with the Blossom Academy team.

All smiles at the Penplusbytes headquarters.

The trip ended with a dinner with the Blossom Academy and Penplusbytes teams. Our sources tell us the food was incredible.
Getting to know the people behind our partner organizations is central to how we build relationships, and we value every chance to share meals, celebrate milestones, and see their work up close.

05/10/2026

We’re hiring! 🌍

Two remote, full-time roles are open at African Collaborative:

🔹 Director, Development & Partnerships
Shape and execute a fundraising strategy that helps shift how funders see and invest in African-led organizations.
Apply: kutt.to/ACDevelopmentApply

🔹 Manager, Finance & Accounting
Own AC’s day-to-day finance work as we bring our finance function in-house, from grant disbursements to the accounting backbone that keeps our finances accurate and audit-ready.
Apply: kutt.to/ACFinanceApply

Both roles start January 2027, earlier preferred. Applications will be shortlisted on a rolling basis, so apply early.

Know someone who would be perfect? Tag them or share this post.

01/10/2026

Africa Book Development Organisation - ABDO's model rests on the belief that the people closest to a problem are the ones who hold its solution.

That's exactly what happened in Sanyati, Zimbabwe. Women from the community came together through what ABDO calls Study Circles, and they used that space to name and solve problems affecting them. One of those solutions resulted in a school the community built entirely on its own.

"Our excitement as ABDO is how the farm women transformed the idea into a tangible and visible infrastructure," says Executive Coordinator Musendo Kuchinei Alpheus. "Today, they are proud that it's their school."

→ Read Fountain of ABDO's full story: https://ow.ly/hRSx50ZTA15
→ Explore all ten incredible organizations in our Cohort 5: https://ow.ly/NKJz50ZTA11

29/09/2026

In Sanyati, Zimbabwe, a group of women who'd spent their lives working a mining community's farmland started small with a garden, organized through what Africa Book Development Organisation - ABDO calls Study Circles. These small discussion groups give women space to talk through what's actually affecting their lives.

The conversations moved from food, to their children, to something more specific. Kids were walking six kilometers to the nearest school, and many girls weren't making the trip at all.

"The women said, 'What we need is a school,'" says Executive Coordinator Musendo Kuchinei Alpheus.

🎧 Alpheus tells the rest of the story.
Learn more about ABDO → www.africancollab.org/partners-all/abdo

24/09/2026

Imagine Her - IH began in 2013 as a menstrual health project. By 2017, it had evolved into a program equipping rural women with social entrepreneurship training and interest-free start-up capital.

The organization was built on the belief that when women have the skills and resources to build businesses, the impact reaches far beyond their own livelihoods.

"When we give a rural woman the right skills and the right resources, she does not just survive," says founder Nathan Okiror. "She starts a venture that puts money in motion, creates jobs for her neighbors, and sends a ripple impact across the entire community."

Faridah, a graduate of the program, put that idea into practice. After seeing her father lose income from spoiled fruit, she started a solar-drying business, buying fruit from local farmers at prices that outpaced what middlemen offered. Her business has since grown into one of Imagine Her's "redwoods": ventures generating at least $50,000 annually and employing five or more people.

→ Read Imagine Her's full story: https://ow.ly/4hQs50ZR4IY
→ Explore all ten incredible organizations in our Cohort 5 → https://ow.ly/aMVi50ZR4J3

22/09/2026

Nathan Okiror started out researching why girls in eastern Uganda were dropping out of school. The answer seemed obvious: menstruation. So he founded Imagine Her - IH and began by training girls to make their own reusable pads.

But the deeper he looked, the clearer it became that menstruation wasn’t the real problem.

Women in rural Uganda do about 77% of farm work but own only about 6% of land. Without land as collateral, most have no way to access a bank account, let alone invest in a daughter’s future.

“It was clear that the mother couldn’t be in position to actually invest in her daughter’s future,” Okiror says.

That single realization reshaped everything Imagine Her does today.

🎧 More from Nathan on what came next.

Learn more about Imagine Her ➡️ africancollab.org/partners-all/imagine-her

18/09/2026

Citizen Gavel calls itself Nigeria's “Uber for justice.” The organization connects people facing injustice with lawyers across all 37 states, helping more people access legal support when they need it.

Their work goes beyond individual cases. After identifying predatory livestreaming targeting minors on TikTok, Citizens' Gavel filed suit, prompting the platform to strengthen its age-verification systems in Nigeria. They’re now pursuing similar action against Telegram over sextortion.

Behind it all is a growing set of technology tools, including a legal AI assistant trained on Nigerian law that has been used by more than 35,000 people. Together, their tools have supported more than 6,500 legal interventions, spanning cases from gender-based violence to wrongful detention.

→ Read Citizens' Gavel's full story → https://ow.ly/mNSt50ZPeov
→ Explore all ten incredible organizations in our Cohort 5: https://ow.ly/5ClX50ZPeox

16/09/2026

Justice delayed is justice denied, and Nelson Olanipekun saw that firsthand in private practice, when a bank instructed his firm to delay an elderly woman’s case simply because they didn’t want to pay out her savings yet.

“That’s not justice to the person,” he says.

That case led him to leave private practice and build Citizen Gavel: a platform connecting victims of injustice with lawyers across Nigeria’s 37 states, the way a rideshare app connects riders with drivers. Since then, the organization has carried out more than 6,500 legal interventions.

“That’s not just numbers,” Olanipekun says. “That’s people’s lives that we’ve touched in different ways.”

🎧 Nelson shares the rest in this clip.

Learn more about Citizens’ Gavel 🇳🇬
africancollab.org/partners-all/citizens-gavel

03/09/2026

"People are not waiting to be saved," said Atti Worku in her keynote at the 10th East Africa Philanthropy Network-EAPN Conference in Addis Ababa.

Drawing on her path from Adama, Ethiopia, through founding Seeds of Africa, to building African Collaborative, our Co-CEO challenged philanthropy to look beyond capital, to the infrastructure that determines whether it can create lasting impact.

African communities already have the knowledge, leadership, and solutions to shape their futures. What they need are systems that strengthen what already works, move resources closer to those closest to the challenge, and enable self-determination.

That means asking harder questions: Who gets to define the standards? Who is philanthropy ultimately accountable to? And do our funding systems reflect the values of trust, local leadership, and shared power that we say we believe in?

"Good infrastructure creates freedom."

Watch the full keynote 🔗

Africa has never suffered from an absence of vision, ingenuity or l...

03/09/2026

Before Tuwindi existed, Mali's anti-corruption oversight body had almost no data to work with, and citizens had no reliable way to report corruption they'd experienced.

Tuwindi built Kenekanko to change that: a platform that lets citizens report corruption and human rights violations directly. Their second platform, Wuya, does the same for misinformation, helping journalists know where false claims are doing the most damage.

But for the team, the clearest sign of change isn't in the platforms. It's in the people.

"Change became real when people began to see themselves as participants, and not only observers or spectators," says Project Assistant Fatoumata Aya Dembele.

Tuwindi also marks a first for African Collaborative: our first partner based in Mali. 🇲🇱

→ Read Tuwindi's full story: www.africancollab.org/blog/tuwindi
→ Explore all ten incredible organizations in our Cohort 5: www.africancollab.org/cohort5