By Oswald Tanaka Mankanya
Zimbabwe is a generous country; its culture of giving is not new. It is woven into the social fabric of the country, expressed through traditions of nhimbe and zunde ramambo, community labour and communal granaries that fed the vulnerable long before the language of philanthropy arrived on the continent.
And yet, for all its generosity, Zimbabwean philanthropy faces a serious question: is it making things better, or is it making inequality more bearable? There is a profound difference between the two. Giving that makes inequality more bearable is relief. Giving that makes inequality less possible is justice. Both are expressions of generosity, but only one transforms the conditions that make generosity necessary in the first place.
Social relief responds to the symptoms of inequality. It pays the hospital bill, provides the food parcel, covers the school fees, and buries the dead with dignity. These interventions matter enormously to those who receive them. No serious argument against relief can ignore the fact that it saves lives. But relief, by its very nature, operates within the existing order. It does not ask why the hospital bill could not be paid, why food was unavailable, why school fees stood between a child and an education. It accepts the conditions that produced the crisis and responds to the crisis itself.
Social justice, by contrast, responds to the causes of inequality. It asks structural questions: who has access to healthcare and why, who controls land and resources, whose children attend which schools, and whose voices shape the policies that govern all of the above. Justice oriented philanthropy does not merely fill the gap left by a failing system. It works to change the system itself, investing in advocacy, institutional reform, community power, and long-term equity.
The Ubuntu philosophy that underlies Zimbabwean social life, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, I am because we are, is often cited as the cultural foundation of African generosity. But Ubuntu is a more demanding ethic than it is sometimes made to appear. It does not simply ask us to give to those who are suffering. It asks us to recognise that their suffering diminishes us, that a community in which some people cannot access healthcare, education, or economic opportunity is a community whose collective humanity is incomplete. Properly understood, Ubuntu does not sanction relief alone. It demands justice.
How Zimbabwean Philanthropy Currently Gives
Zimbabwean philanthropy today operates through several overlapping structures. Corporate foundations, many attached to mining, banking, and telecommunications companies, fund scholarships, build classrooms, and support health programmes in communities near their operations. Faith based organisations, which constitute one of the most significant channels of social support in the country, run feeding programmes, orphan care initiatives, and hospital chaplaincy services. Community based organisations and burial societies provide mutual support at the grassroots level. And increasingly, high profile individual giving, amplified by social media, directs resources toward individuals and families in visible distress.
Each of these channels reflects genuine commitment and produces real benefit. But examined together, they share a common orientation: they are overwhelmingly relief focused. Corporate foundations tend to give where their reputational interests are most visible. Faith organisations prioritise immediate pastoral care over systemic advocacy. Burial societies and community groups, operating with limited resources, concentrate on survival rather than transformation. And social media driven giving, for all its energy and reach, is almost entirely reactive: it responds to whoever is most visible at a given moment rather than to those with the greatest structural need.
The cumulative effect is a philanthropic ecosystem that is active, visible, and emotionally resonant but structurally conservative. It does not challenge the conditions that produce poverty and exclusion. It adapts
to them, filling the gaps that the state and the market leave behind, and in doing so, inadvertently makes those gaps more sustainable. When philanthropy becomes the primary social safety net, it relieves pressure on institutions that should be accountable for delivering services as a matter of right rather than charity.
What Needs to Change
Moving Zimbabwean philanthropy from relief to justice is not simply a matter of individual donors choosing differently. It requires structural shifts in how philanthropic resources are organised, directed, and held accountable. Five changes are essential.
From reactive to strategic giving. The dominance of reactive, crisis driven philanthropy means that resources follow visibility rather than need. A family whose story goes viral receives support; a family in identical circumstances who lacks a social media presence receives nothing. Justice oriented philanthropy requires proactive, evidence based resource allocation: identifying communities with the greatest structural disadvantage and directing sustained investment toward them rather than waiting for a crisis to become visible. This demands that foundations and corporate giving programmes move from annual donation cycles toward long term strategic commitments grounded in social data.
From individual relief to systems investment. Philanthropy that pays for an individual’s treatment, school fees, or funeral provides essential support but does not change the system that made that support necessary. Justice oriented philanthropy invests in the systems themselves: funding clinics rather than individual medical bills, supporting teacher training rather than individual scholarships, strengthening community health infrastructure rather than responding to individual emergencies. In Zimbabwe, where public health and education systems have been severely strained, the potential impact of systems level philanthropic investment is enormous and largely untapped.
From charity to advocacy. One of the most significant structural gaps in Zimbabwean philanthropy is the near absence of advocacy funding. Civil society organisations that monitor government budgets, litigate for constitutional rights, organise communities to claim services, and document the impact of policy failures are chronically underfunded. Yet their work addresses the root causes of the very crises that reactive philanthropy spends enormous resources responding to. A justice oriented philanthropic ecosystem would treat advocacy not as a controversial or political activity but as one of the highest leverage investments available: changing a policy can do more for health equity than a decade of paying individual medical bills.
From top down to participatory. Zimbabwean philanthropy, particularly at the corporate and institutional level, tends to flow downward: donors decide what is needed, design programmes accordingly, and deliver them to communities as beneficiaries rather than as participants. This model, however well intentioned, reproduces the very hierarchies that social justice seeks to dismantle. Justice oriented philanthropy places communities at the centre of decision making: consulting residents before designing programmes, funding community led initiatives rather than externally managed projects, and building the organisational capacity of grassroots groups to direct their own development. The wisdom of nhimbe is not simply that people help each other. It is that they help each other as equals, each contributing according to their capacity, each benefiting according to their need.
From generosity to accountability. Perhaps the deepest structural shift required is cultural: moving from a model in which giving is understood as an act of personal generosity, discretionary and praiseworthy, toward one in which philanthropy is understood as a form of public accountability. Wealth generated in a society shaped by inequality carries an obligation that goes beyond the impulse to give. Justice oriented philanthropy asks not only how much is being given, but whether what is being given is actually reducing inequality, expanding access to opportunity, and building the conditions for a society in which fewer people need charity. That requires rigorous evaluation, transparent reporting, and a willingness to be held accountable for impact rather than simply for intention.
What Ubuntu Actually Asks of Us
Zimbabwe’s philanthropic traditions are a source of genuine pride and genuine power. The instinct to give, to show up for a neighbour in crisis, to pool resources when one member of the community falls, is not something to be argued away. It is something to be built upon.
But building upon it means being honest about its current limits. A philanthropy that responds to crises without addressing their causes is not failing because it is ungenerous. It is falling short because it has not yet taken Ubuntu seriously enough. If my humanity is truly bound up in yours, then it is not enough to help you survive the consequences of a system that excludes you. I am obligated to work toward a system that does not exclude you in the first place.
The shift from relief to justice is not a rejection of generosity. It is its fullest expression. It asks philanthropic actors across Zimbabwe, corporate foundations, faith organisations, community groups, and individual donors, to bring the same warmth and commitment that characterises their giving to the harder, slower, less visible work of structural change. That is what a just philanthropy looks like. And that is what Ubuntu, at its most demanding and its most hopeful, has always called us toward.