In May, PFE Director Angus Grinham travelled to Senegal to visit some of the organisations participating in the Social Impact Incubator (SII) West Africa, a program launched by the Segal Family Foundation in partnership with Partners for Equity. The SII supports early-stage, locally led organisations in Benin, Senegal and Togo, with a focus on founders proximate to the communities they serve.
A graduation ceremony had been planned, but election-related instability in Benin and associated travel disruptions across the Middle East meant it was cancelled. Angus decided to continue with his planned visit along with some of our friends from the Segal team. The group met with around half of the current cohort across sectors including health, education, agriculture, domestic worker advocacy and social welfare.
A region largely overlooked by funders
One of the clearest themes from the trip was how little philanthropic attention West Africa receives relative to need. Under-five mortality and maternal death rates are roughly double those in East Africa, yet foreign funding into the region is estimated at only 5 to 10% of what East Africa receives.
As one participant put it, “money in Africa speaks English.” Philanthropy tends to follow mineral and mining investment, which has historically concentrated in Anglophone regions. Many of the organisations Angus met had never seriously considered that philanthropic capital might be available to them.
Communication is a separate but related barrier. Many organisations operate entirely in French, which limits their visibility to predominantly English-speaking funders. Angus noted that real-time AI translation is beginning to help, making conversations across language barriers more practical than they’ve previously been.
Hybrid models and the funding gap
Twenty-eight percent of the first SII cohort started as for-profit or hybrid organisations, a notably higher rate than in East Africa. After speaking with founders about this, a picture emerged: many had concluded they were unlikely to attract grants, so they built revenue generation into their model from the start.
A related structural barrier came up repeatedly: many funders will not consider organisations with annual revenue below $1 million. In West Africa, relatively few organisations are above that threshold, which becomes a self-reinforcing problem. Funders don’t engage because the organisations are too small; organisations stay small partly because funders don’t engage. Angus sees the SII as one way to interrupt that cycle.
What the site visits showed
The trip surfaced some specific on-the-ground realities. In coastal communities, seasonal flooding compromises pit toilets and creates persistent sanitation-related disease, while medical centres five to six kilometres away are often inaccessible during the rainy season. These are the conditions the organisations in the cohort are working within.
On the people he met, Angus was direct:
“I was also struck by the quality of talent. The founders and leaders I met were as strong as any I’ve seen anywhere – smart, ambitious, deeply committed, and tackling genuinely important problems, just without the resources they need. The incubator has already made a real difference: groups consistently said the most valuable part was simply being connected to others doing similar work. Many had felt completely alone before.”
The bigger picture
Angus came away feeling positive about the program and about what it could become. The hope is that as cohort organisations grow, they become more visible to a wider pool of funders, gradually shifting what the funding landscape in West Africa looks like. But the trip also brought into sharp relief how much is at stake. At a hotel, a staff member was told cheerfully by a colleague that he wouldn’t be there next time, because he had landed a job with the Russian army. In a nearby village, a woman spoke proudly about her son joining what she described as a “police” force in Russia, encouraging other young men to do the same because the pay was good. It is a small sample, but it points to something larger: when formal opportunity is scarce, recruitment into conflict becomes viable. The problems are large, and the resources directed toward them remain small. That gap is also the opportunity, and Angus returned believing the organisations he met are well placed to help close it.
