I’m writing in my personal capacity, not on behalf of Animal Advocacy Africa.

TL;DR

Almost all funding for effective animal advocacy in Africa comes from donors in the Global North. That’s understandable (and often essential), but we may be underestimating the value and feasibility of cultivating local giving ecosystems in LMICs, including in Africa.

Local donors likely matter for more than just “more money”: they can shift which questions get asked, what feels legitimate, and how resilient a movement is if global attention or funding priorities change.

The issue

I work at Animal Advocacy Africa (AAA), where we help build the effective farmed animal advocacy movement across the continent.

One part of our work over the last few years has been to help increase funding for farmed animal advocacy in Africa. There has been progress: momentum seems to be growing, and more people are paying attention to Africa as a high-impact region for animals.

But in absolute terms, funding remains small compared to North America and Europe (p. 17 here), and there’s a related pattern that I keep coming back to: Most of the funding for farmed animal advocacy in Africa still comes from the Global North.

That isn’t a complaint. At the moment, it’s what allows the work to exist at all. Still, I find myself wondering what it means—strategically and culturally—when a regional movement is almost entirely financed from outside that region.

Why this matters

I’m not claiming that external funding inevitably leads to poor strategies or that local donors automatically produce better ones. I also think external funding will remain crucial for a long time.

But I do wonder whether there’s something structurally fragile about having almost no local donor base—especially in a young movement. It seems worth having a meaningful share of support coming from people who live in the context in which the movement operates.

Why this could matter:

1. Strategy and local context
   Money shapes movements. It affects which projects get tried, which organisations survive, what gets measured, and what kinds of risks are acceptable. If most capital comes from a different region, that may (subtly, unintentionally) shape priorities and assumptions. Some strategic questions are deeply context-dependent (politics, culture, institutional incentives, reputational dynamics). Local donors may bring different assumptions and highlight different opportunities or overlooked risks.
2. Legitimacy and narratives
   Movements can be perceived differently depending on whether they’re locally supported. Even modest local funding can change how work is framed: from “externally funded projects” to “something people here care about.”
3. Resilience
   External funding priorities can shift with philanthropic trends, macroeconomic conditions, or changing attention. A local donor base can buffer against that and make a movement less brittle.
4. Movement-building psychology
   This one is hard to quantify, but it feels real: there’s a different kind of ownership when people fund something in their own society. It can build pride, seriousness, and long-term commitment.

None of this implies that local donors are always right, or that external donors are missing key context. It’s more that diversifying where the money comes from seems plausibly good for epistemics and long-term health.

This seems tractable

Part of why I’m writing this is that I think some people (especially in the Global North) implicitly default to seeing LMICs primarily as recipients of aid. And of course, many people in LMICs face real financial constraints. But the picture is also more mixed than the default narrative suggests. (I recommend Dipo Faloyin’s Africa Is Not a Country.)

There is a large and growing urban population in many African countries whose incomes and consumption patterns are increasingly similar to high-income contexts—and whose capacity for philanthropy is likely to grow over time.

At AAA we recently tested a small version of this idea in our Pathways course. We encouraged participants to think about effective giving for farmed animals in Africa and introduced the Giving What We Can 10% and Trial Pledges. From around 250 course participants who completed the section on effective giving, we received close to 20 giving pledges (four 10% Pledges, the rest Trial Pledges). That’s not a huge number, but this was only a first experiment that hints at significant potential. One Pathways participant later even wrote a short blog post inspired by the course, reflecting on philanthropy and animal welfare in Africa.

A common objection

One pushback I expect is something like:

“In LMIC contexts, direct work is usually higher leverage than earning to give, because earning potential is lower.”

I think that’s often true. If someone has strong fit for advocacy, policy, research, or organisation-building, the counterfactual impact of doing the work locally can be enormous. Still, I’m not sure this implies that local giving is a minor side issue.

Two thoughts:

1. It’s not either/or at the movement level.
   Even if most people should focus on direct work, a movement might still benefit significantly from having some share of funding come from within the region.
2. People differ a lot in fit and preferences.
   Not everyone in Africa (or other LMICs) wants to found or work for a nonprofit, and not everyone is best suited to it. Some people will have unusually strong fit for higher-earning paths (tech, law, consulting, entrepreneurship, etc.), and many people may have more impact outside nonprofits (see here and here for further discussion on this issue).

I’m not trying to make a big “everyone in Africa should earn to give” pitch. I’m more pointing at a blind spot: if we assume that LMIC EAs should nearly always do direct work, we might neglect a potentially important contributor group—local donors—while also narrowing people’s perceived option space.

A call for discussion

I’m genuinely not sure how to weigh these considerations.

• How big is the strategic downside of having funding be mostly external?
• How tractable is it to build local giving ecosystems in LMIC contexts?
• When does it make sense to prioritise this, versus prioritising direct work and/or Global North fundraising?

I’d love thoughts—especially from people working in Africa or other LMIC contexts—on any of these:

• If you’ve worked in an LMIC movement funded primarily by external donors: how did that shape strategy, culture, or incentives in practice?
• What are promising ways to build local donor bases (or at least local donor influence) without distracting organisations from their core work?
• Do you think EA communities underinvest in developing donors outside high-income countries?
• How should we think about the “direct work vs earning to give” tradeoff in LMIC contexts, given heterogeneity in fit and earning potential?
• If you are in an LMIC and have considered donating effectively: what made it easier or harder?

Even if the conclusion ends up being that local giving should remain a secondary priority, I suspect it’s worth examining the assumption rather than taking it for granted.