Arab Foundations Forum had its annual meeting in person this year on the 11th, 12th, and 13th of Sep, 2023. During this meeting, different philanthropy organisations, donors, and change makers met, exchanged ideas, and imagined how the future of philanthropy in the region could look like in two decades. It was fruitful and exciting to be there as someone who is working in the development sector on a regional level in MENA. 

My understanding of the ways in which this sector works and how heavily it is regulated was lacking before this annual meeting. In so many ways it helped me to understand what role this sector plays in creating a sustainable development ecosystem in the region but also its limitations and why some of those attempts might be hindered. 

One of the ways in which we can overcome these challenges as everyone agreed in the last workshop, is through creating a community where we can collaborate across sectors. But how can collaborations help overcome the challenges of sustainable development in the region? 

The three pillars of sustainable development are Environmental, Social, and Economic, but a fourth important pillar was added by Dr Ali Awni in one of the parallel sessions about collaborations for systems change. This pillar was Governance. To enable the ecosystem of sustainability, people need to feel a sense of agency over their lives and to be able to imagine better futures because they can contribute to this bright future. 

This requires fostering community-led initiatives without imposing a language or a solution on these communities. Without also assuming that we know what is right for them to do or think. Changing the mindsets of the people from being defeatists into initiators and change-makers sometimes only requires having the capacity to listen while using their own language/ discourse without taking them away from their own realities by imposing concepts that do not belong to their culture and history. 

One of these clear examples is “social entrepreneurship” but also any other concepts created by the global north and “given” to the global south to adopt without questioning the genealogy of these concepts and how they can be applied in a totally different context. This, unfortunately, leads to creating “trends” and abusing these concepts instead of truly applying them and creating tangible change on the ground. 

One of the takeaways from those three days is that we need a language to express ourselves. I was happy to hear that most of the time, Arabic was being used as the language for communications but still, we needed English to convey the meanings. This may shed light on where the thought leadership of this sector and many other sectors in the development field is coming from. 

It is important and indeed enriching to learn from the experience of the world-leading organizations in this sector. But it would also be as enriching for the world if we give ourselves a chance to create our own narrative from thought leadership and community-led practices that stem from the region and its cultures.

Therefore, working together and creating collaboratives become the first step for us to make all of the mentioned above possible. “Luckily, Arab philanthropy has witnessed a visible growth in intra- and inter-sector philanthropic partnerships and collaboratives — with the literature pointing to a surge in interest in building partnerships that can deepen impact and achieve scale. The diversity and scope of partnerships in the sector is expanding. A recent scan of philanthropic partnerships in the GCC foundation sector indicated the prevalence of grantee-and-grantor partnership modalities, inter-philanthropy partnerships, and growing partnerships and collaboration with government, especially in the GCC. In contrast, partnerships with the government are not considered a strong feature in the rest of the Arab region. With some trust-based philanthropic practices, multi-stakeholder, and multi-year strategic partnerships emerging, the room to spread and strengthen the impact of philanthropic partnerships is immense.”

As a main outcome of the last workshop we attended, ‘Advancing Arab Philanthropic Partnership and Collaboratives’, the Arab Foundation Forum members proposed creating a platform that can help open the channels of communications between different philanthropy and donor organisations to exchange knowledge, build on each other’s interventions and close the gap in the enabling ecosystem for sustainable development if possible. A platform that will also create a space where we can deeply listen to change-makers to help the sector shape a receptive environment for their initiatives by creating new economies and proposing new bold strategies for change. Read more about this initiative here. 

Ghufran Abudayyeh is the MENA Chapters Coordinator at Catalyst 2030.