Giving to Help, Helping to Give: The Context and Politics of African Philanthropy

In the past decade, the emerging narratives about philanthropy in Africa are the capacities to give not only to help, but also to address the root causes of injustice, want, ignorance, and disease. The narratives are also about the questioning of the role and place of Africans in the world's philanthropic traditions, and what constitutes African specificities, as well as African differences and varieties. Giving to Help, Helping to Give deftly explores African philanthropic experiences - the varieties, the challenges, and the opportunities - while also documenting, investigating, analyzing, and reflecting on philanthropy in multifaceted Africa. This ground-breaking book rightly tackles the varied modes, forms, vehicles, and means in which philanthropy is expressed. It is a pioneering and ambitious effort in a field and community of practice that is new, both in terms of scholarship and in professional practice. Many of the chapters boldly engage the burden of reflections, questions, ambivalences, and ambiguities that one often finds in an emerging field, innovatively positing the outlines, concepts, frameworks, and theories of scholarship and practice for a field critical to development on the continent. *** "Overall this volume effectively represents the vibrancy and diversity of emerging institutions of philanthropy on the African continent. The contributions are clearly located in an emerging community of practice and scholarship and provide a wealth of new data on a rapidly changing philanthropic landscape." -- Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, August 2016

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