Introduction
This report analyses Executive Director (ED) compensation across 14 local and 10 international organisations operating in Sub-Saharan Africa. It explores salary levels relative to organisational budgets to identify trends, disparities, and implications for leadership sustainability, succession planning, and organisational performance.
Local organisations are in-country registered grassroots organisations led by in-country leadership, while international organisations are foreign-led globally registered entities operating in Africa.
Background
The Partners for Equity (PFE) Local Leaders Portfolio initiated a salary benchmarking assessment to understand whether under-compensation was contributing to the challenges in leadership transitions within locally led organisations. Compared with their Western-led peers, local organisations experienced more fragile transitions, often marked by founder-dependence, limited succession options, and constrained operational capacity. This benchmarking exercise was driven by three core questions:
- Do limited budgets in locally led organisations hinder their ability to attract qualified external successors?
- Are founder salaries within these organisations too low to create a viable leadership pipeline?
- Is the frequent practice of promoting from within driven more by budget constraints than by actual leadership readiness?
Our objective is to guide organisations within the Local Leaders Portfolio in designing fair and sustainable compensation frameworks for senior leadership roles, which are critical to enabling effective leadership transitions and long-term organisational resilience.
Data Overview
Data was collected from 14 local organisations in PFE’s Local Leaders Portfolio and 10 international organisations with annual budgets ranging from USD 600,000 to 3 million, all of which are managing programs of comparable scale and complexity. See Appendix A for details.
Data sources included direct submissions, internal portfolio analysis, and triangulation with publicly available financial documents. All salary data is presented in annual gross USD equivalents.
Although data was collected from 8 additional local organisations and 12 international organisations, it was excluded from the comparison dataset because the budgets were either too low (for local organisations) or too high (for international organisations) to allow meaningful comparison. Nonetheless, insights from this data have been incorporated elsewhere in the report.
It was generally challenging to identify international organisations with budgets below $1.2M, which means local NGOs dominate the $800K–$1.2M bracket (6 local vs. 1 international). In fact, while we collected data from several international organisations with budgets exceeding $3M, very few local organisations operate at this scale.
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