The Ecobank Foundation, the charitable foundation for Ecobank, partnered with CAF to reposition its work and enhance its impact in the communities it serves across Africa.
A corporate foundation in Africa is helping to battle life-threatening diseases and achieve social change across the continent in a sustainable and lasting way, thanks to a collaboration with CAF.
The Ecobank Foundation, the charitable foundation for Ecobank, partnered with CAF to reposition its work and enhance its impact in the communities it serves across Africa.
The partnership aimed to review the Foundation’s mission to achieve social change in health, education and financial inclusion, while also helping to battle life-threatening diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
By helping them build a strategy, governance and impact framework that aligns their work with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, CAF’s Corporate Advisory team has enabled Ecobank Foundation to engage core business leaders and staff, identifying shared agendas, widening its influence and finding new partners.
Speaking about the partnership with CAF, Carl Manlan, Chief Operating Officer at the Ecobank Foundation, said:
“As the foundation of a financial institution, we sought to understand how we could bring other parts of the bank to broaden their engagement with the community in which we are operating. The collaboration with CAF gave us access to platforms and organizations to help us be at the edge of current thinking around philanthropy.
We also started to engage with different businesses segments, collaborating with parts of the business we hadn’t reached before.”
Previously, the Foundation ran a range of philanthropic programmes including a long-running programme with the Global Fund, which mobilises $3million a year in grant funding. The grants are given to non-governmental organisations and public organisations who work to support HIV, tuberculosis and malaria programmes in countries across Africa.
One of the main objectives of the Global Fund partnership is to strengthen the financial management capacity of the Fund’s grant recipients, training up partners in target countries and providing stronger digital financial platforms for grant implementers to foster greater accountability.
This builds capacity in local grassroots organisations and allows them to become more sustainable while serving the wider community.
Carl added: “CAF’s framework allowed us to think strategically and implement a theory of change, going beyond simply donating money to looking at wider sources of value.
“We’re now able to collaborate more confidently with businesses and local organisations to come up with core design rather than just giving money in a ‘quick fix’ kind of way.”
Klara Kozlov, Head of Corporate Clients at CAF added: “We were truly delighted to work with the team at the Ecobank Foundation, using the SDGs to multiply social impact. It’s great to see a major bank on the African continent taking such a positive leadership role in social change. At CAF, we are committed to partnering with our clients to help them achieve multiple objectives whilst ensuring impact remains central to their approach and outcomes.”