Can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your organisation?
I was brought into Zambia in January 2008 to set up the Zambia Governance Fund as it was called then, which was designed as a multi donor pool fund to support the work of local civil society organizations in Zambia. The focus was on supporting local organizations to become more proactive in their work. ZGF’s unique heritage began when a group of bilateral donors, namely, Department for International Development (DFID), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Irish Aid came together in 2008 to discuss a more coordinated manner of channeling money to civil society organizations. At that time, the practice of independently supporting CSOs in different ways created a duplication of work and kept transaction costs high. Donors committed money to the pooled funding mechanism and the Danish government volunteered to facilitate an international tender for the management of the newly created Zambia Governance Fund. The newly set up fund faced some initial challenges, the most pressing being the lack of a legal identity that gave it the ability to operate independently. Through a process of deliberation, it was determined that the fund would become a company limited by guarantee of five Zambians volunteering to establish the foundation.
However, ZGF has been on a journey of inner transformation driven by the urge of redefining its reason for existence as a foundation, sparked by various developments and events. In 2012, the ZGF board and founders made a strategic decision to allow the Foundation to incrementally change its operations by transforming the organisation from an entirely donor funded platform to an organisation that is more independent from donors and therefore more self-sufficient and sustainable in the medium- and long term. They wanted to turn it into a foundation, imbedding it in a context also led us to introduce community philanthropy as a strong pillar of work of ZGF which with the help of the Global Fund for Community Foundations. Since 2017, we have been trying to slowly integrate incrementally increase our work or support community led development in Zambia through our own little initiatives and because of that we have also managed to attract some donors like an Anonymous donor, the MOTT foundation and the Global Fund for Community foundation to support us in this journey. So that’s in a nutshell I think.
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