Written By Dr. Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji
Africa’s giving culture is visible in places that formal statistics often miss. Money moves through families, religious institutions, neighbourhoods, mutual-aid arrangements and formal foundations.
Research on African philanthropy describes solidarity, reciprocity and mutual assistance as important features of giving, alongside its religious and institutional forms. Evidence from Ghana [1] shows that giving operates through a mixture of religious, familial, community and formal philanthropic channels, though the available evidence remains too fragmented to treat this pattern as representative of the continent as a whole.
The puzzle is not whether Africans give. They clearly do. It is whether some of that capacity for private mobilisation could also support the production of new knowledge.
That is a question about institutions, not about generosity.
We do not know how much Africans give
The first difficulty is knowing how much giving actually occurs.
The OECD [2] notes that much domestic philanthropic activity in Africa remains inadequately captured in international statistics, and calls for better mapping of the sector. This matters because the visible figures mostly describe formal organisations and recorded flows, while a great deal of giving moves through informal or relational channels that no register captures.
Nigeria illustrates the measurement problem. An OECD [3] survey invited 56 domestic foundations to participate, and only 12 completed it. The OECD cautioned that the low response rate and small sample did not permit generalisations about Nigeria’s domestic philanthropic sector.
We therefore know less about African private giving than the rhetoric around African generosity sometimes suggests.
The research funding gap is clearer
The weakness of research financing is easier to document.
UNESCO’s [4] latest figures put research and development expenditure in sub-Saharan Africa at 0.38% of GDP in 2023, compared with a global average of 1.92%. The World Bank similarly reports that most sub-Saharan African countries remain below the African Union’s 1% R&D benchmark.
An earlier UNESCO [5] analysis found that R&D in Africa was mainly a government and university activity, with private-sector involvement marginal in most countries, South Africa being an important exception.
These figures describe a weak research system. They do not, however, tell us why private wealth and philanthropy have not become larger sources of research finance.
Correlation is not an explanation
That distinction is where the real question begins.
Evidence can establish strong traditions of giving and weak private participation in research without establishing that one explains the other. A correlation between two weakly measured phenomena is not a mechanism.
Current evidence does not support the conclusion that wealthy Africans prefer consumption, religious giving, ceremonies or patronage to research. Nor can we say that African philanthropy is predominantly religious. The evidence is too incomplete and the continent too diverse for either claim.
The more useful question is narrower.
If societies already possess durable mechanisms for mobilising private resources around religion, family and community, why have equally visible mechanisms not developed around research, experimentation and independent knowledge?
Why might donors hesitate?
Several explanations are plausible, but each remains a question for investigation rather than a finding.
Research produces uncertain and delayed returns, and its value is difficult for a donor to assess before results emerge. A donor may also find it easier to identify an immediate beneficiary than to evaluate a university laboratory, a research institute or a policy experiment.
Institutional capacity matters too. Where research organisations lack strong governance, transparent evaluation or credible mechanisms for managing private funds, potential donors may hesitate to commit.
Family and community obligations shape giving decisions in ways that formal appeals rarely account for, and immediate social needs compete with investments whose benefits may arrive years later.
None of these explanations should be treated as established without comparative evidence across countries.
Private initiative is not foreign to Africa
A market-based reading of this problem need not be imported from elsewhere.
As George Ayittey and other scholars of African economic history have shown, precolonial African societies had traditions of trade, entrepreneurship, customary property, mutual aid and decentralised economic organisation.
Those societies were diverse and should not be romanticised, but markets and voluntary economic activity are not foreign to African experience.
The question today is whether those traditions of private initiative and collective action can find new institutional expression in research.
Spread the risk
Research is an uncertain investment, and that is an argument for spreading the risk rather than concentrating it.
Governments, businesses, foundations and individuals can each bear different risks and support different kinds of ideas. The aim is not to replace public research with private philanthropy, but to widen the sources of capital available for discovery.
Africa already has institutions capable of mobilising private resources. The unresolved question is whether some of that capacity can be connected to universities, independent research organisations and experimentation.
We do not yet know whether existing giving patterns and weak private participation in R&D are connected at all. Answering that would require better measurement of private giving and much closer study of how donors actually choose between competing causes.
It is precisely the question worth investigating.
Dr. Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji is a development economist and agricultural policy researcher whose work examines food security, poverty, markets, agricultural policy and economic development, particularly in Africa. His research combines empirical evidence with policy analysis to examine contemporary economic and development issues.
Sources
[1] Owusu-Ansah, M., & Moyo, B. (2025). “Individual giving in Ghana: A self-determination theory approach to giving.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 36(1), 43–59.
[2] OECD (2026). Private Philanthropy for Development (Third Edition): Taking Stock of Philanthropy’s Contribution to Development.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2026/03/private-philanthropy-for-development-third-edition_c4f4bea1/98e676c0-en.pdf
Accessed 15 August 2026.
[3] OECD (2022). Domestic Philanthropy for Development and Gender Equality in Nigeria.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/domestic-philanthropy-for-development-and-gender-equality-in-nigeria_8efe47b4-en.html
Accessed 15 August 2026.
[4] UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2026). 2026 R&D Data Release.
https://www.uis.unesco.org/en/2026-rd-data-release
[5] UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2017). Global Investments in R&D (Fact Sheet No. 42, FS/2017/SCI/42). UNESCO Digital Library.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247772