In July 2020, Charlene Lackay, group corporate social investment (CSI) manager at financial services group, Momentum Metropolitan Holdings (Momentum Metropolitan) was considering how best to monitor and evaluate the activities of the Momentum Metropolitan Foundation volunteer programme. Pressure on funding made it critical to provide evidence of what the programme was achieving.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began having a devastating impact on the Egyptian economy and people, and Noura Selim, executive director of the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development (SFSD), considered how the foundation should address the needs of the most marginalised populations. Up until then, SFSD had largely focused on improving the lives of poor people through education, and social and economic empowerment programmes.

By June 2019, Janet Mawiyoo, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF), and her executive team had reached the conclusion that it was no longer viable for the Foundation, which carried out the organisation’s development activities, to be so integrally involved in the operations of the investment activities of the KCDF Trust, the latter having been established in the mid-2000s to manage and grow the assets of the Foundation.

At the beginning of September 2023, Dr Judy Dlamini, the founder and chair of the Female Academic Leaders Fellowship (FALF), reflected on FALF’s progress in its pursuit of transformation in academia. Formed in 2020, FALF was an independent, registered, non-profit company that aimed specifically to empower black and coloured women from South Africa to progress into academic leadership at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).

On 5 March 2020, the first in-country South African tested positive for COVID-19. Less than three weeks later, on 23 March, after schools and universities had already closed and a number of organisations had adopted a work-from-home policy, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the whole country would go into hard lockdown for 21 days from midnight on 26 March 2020.

It was January 2024, almost 13 years since Fayus Inc, a US-based distributor of Nigerian food products, had started investing in oil palm plantations in Nigeria. The project was progressing well and included a plan to build an oil palm processing mill so that Fayus would own a fully vertically-integrated oil palm business by 2027. Fatai Yusufu, who had founded the business in 1992 and grown it into a global enterprise, now had the opportunity to expand the plantation by a further 5 000 hectares (almost doubling its size).

It was July 2021 and a beautiful midwinter day in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). The temperate conditions belied the turmoil of political protests that had spread to all-out vandalism and looting across the province and, to a more limited extent, Gauteng. Durban’s inner-city, home to the Denis Hurley Centre (DHC), an inter-faith charity serving homeless people in greater Durban, was greatly affected. As Raymond Perrier, director of the Centre, watched the events unfold, he knew there would now be an even greater need for the work of the Centre.

Louise Driver, executive director of the Independent Philanthropy Association South Africa (IPASA), a membership-based organisation of independent philanthropic funders, shared the challenges of the slow progress of the association’s three-year initiative to encourage its members to adopt a climate lens in their funding strategies and to progress members along their climate response journeys.

In early March 2024, Adri Williams, the managing director of Khayelitsha Cookies (KC), a social enterprise based in Cape Town, South Africa, was satisfied that, 20 years after it was founded, KC was achieving its vision of providing meaningful work to otherwise unemployable women in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town. But although the company was technically solvent, it still had outstanding debt of R1.1 million (nearly US$60 000), which needed to be repaid by 2027.

In November 2023, during National Disability Rights Awareness Month in South Africa, Steve, Jabulani and Malcolm, three employees with disabilities who worked for Corpco, a large organisation based in Johannesburg, met up for a chat at the coffee shop in their office. Their conversation turned to how to cope with the challenge of being defined by their disability, despite the fact that the country had progressive policies on the inclusion of employees with disabilities in the workplace.