The money is changing. Africa’s institutions should be ready for it

I read an interview this week that I have not been able to put down.

It was with Alexander Berger, who runs Coefficient Giving – the organisation many of us still think of as open philanthropy. The headline news was growth. They crossed a billion dollars in annual giving last year, and they expect to grow by half again this year and half again the year after.

But the number is not the part that stayed with me.

“When capital takes long bets, it rewards institutions that can hold a steady story across years, not just deliver a project across a quarter.”

What lingered in my mind was the transformation of money. Not just how much there is, but how it is starting to behave.

For most of my career, global development capital has moved in a fairly familiar way. A large funder decides on a priority. The priority becomes a programme. The program finds implementers. The money flows down a chain that everyone in this sector knows by heart.

That chain is being redrawn.

Coefficient is pooling capital now – inviting many donors to back a shared, research-driven approach rather than each going it alone. This push to become multi-donor was the single biggest reason behind their rebrand. And on the horizon is something larger still; a coming wave of philanthropic wealth created by artificial intelligence, with foundations that could dwarf anything the sector has seen.

So the money is getting bigger, more pooled, and more willing to make what Berger called “non-consensus bets” – backing things that do not look obvious yet and waiting years, sometimes decades, for them to pay off.

Here is the question I have been sitting with. If the capital is changing how it thinks, are our institutions changing how they prepare?

I ask this question not as a criticism of anyone. I ask because I have spent years on both sides of these conversations, and I know how easy it is to keep presenting ourselves to funders the way we did ten years ago, even as the funders themselves have moved on.

When capital pools, it rewards those who can be understood quickly by many partners at once – not just the one funder who already knows them. When capital takes long bets, it rewards institutions that can hold a steady story across years, not just deliver a project across a quarter. And when capital starts asking harder questions about what is truly neglected and what is truly tractable, it rewards those who can show, with evidence, not only that a problem matters but also that they are the ones who can move it.

These are not fundraising skills. They are institutional ones.

I think this is the real opportunity in front of African organisations right now, and it is a hopeful one.

For a long time, the conversation about development funding has been framed around scarcity – what is being cut, what is shrinking, and who is pulling back. That conversation is real, and many of us are living it. But the Coefficient story points at something running alongside the scarcity: capital that is actively looking for serious, credible institutions to back for the long term and is willing to bet before the rest of the world catches up.

The question is whether we are building the kind of institutions that capital like this can recognise.

That means being legible. It means being able to explain, in terms a funder who has never set foot in our context can trust, exactly what we do, why it matters, and what makes us the ones to do it. Not louder. Clearer.

It means being patient in the same way the best capital becomes patient – building things that hold their shape over years so that when a long-term funder goes looking for a long-term partner, we are already standing, already steady, and already there.

And it means being honest about evidence. The new capital is unsentimental. It wants to know what is working and what is not. The institutions that thrive will be the ones willing to show their workings, not just their wins.

None of this is about chasing money. It is about meeting a changing partner halfway.

The most striking thing Berger said was that his organisation now wants to take more swings at things that “don’t look very promising right now”. Read that again from where we sit. Somewhere, capital is being built that is specifically looking for the unobvious, the early, the overlooked – and a great deal of that lives on this continent.

The money is changing. It is becoming more willing to bet on us than the old story of scarcity suggests.

Our job is to become the kind of partner worth betting on, and then to be ready, and in the room, when the bet is being placed.

Ota Akhigbe is the Director of Partnerships and Programmes at eHealth Africa, where she works at the intersection of global health partnerships, institutional financing, and systems strengthening across Africa. She has spent close to two decades building the relationships and structures that connect institutions, capital, and the partners who turn ideas into lasting impact.