Developing Thoughts on the Animal Advocacy Community in Africa

African animal advocacy movement may be under-exploring its potential and is NOT talent-constrained. Instead, the movement is currently held back by the following:

Lack of strategy R&D: This stems from two sources: limited exploratory, outside-the-box thinking, and funding habits that do not reward thorough research and the development of relevant interventions.

Lack of space for innovation: Few, if any, African animal advocacy organizations have a dedicated special or new projects team, because most are scrambling to keep running into the next year. Most do not dedicate enough staff and resources to developing stealth projects that could one day spin off or open a new area of work for the organization.

High risk aversion? This may be an underlying reason for the constraints above and their knock-on effects. What level of risk-taking is reasonable? Who leads or guides the norm- and behavior-setting conversations that reduce in-fighting?

Cost of recruiting and training people from outside the movement: Africa has an abundant talent pool, so African groups are not talent-constrained. Rather, groups are unable to absorb this talent for several reasons, which used to be reduced to "funding". Some may say funding is being unlocked, with the dollar amounts going to African groups growing year on year, and that the barrier now surfacing is the cost of bringing in people from this large talent pool and training them. However, this growth starts from a very low base, and much of it is short-term and restricted to specific projects rather than covering core costs such as recruiting and training staff.

Program support and MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning): Several groups lack dedicated, experienced operational, administrative and program staff. A single person may be responsible for all three of these functions and more. As a result, proper monitoring, designated learning opportunities and communication of impact are heavily deprioritized, and in most cases non-existent.

Low wages: This is a controversial area. Most animal advocacy groups pay significantly lower salaries than other local NGOs in the same country, such as health, development and conservation NGOs. They also offer few or no benefits such as health insurance, pension or professional development. As a result, the movement loses talent to these neighboring sectors. This is in sharp contrast to international GH&D (global health and development) organizations, which have been criticized for paying high wages.

Outsider "Africa is cheap" expectation: Some people I speak with who have no experience of working in Africa assume that running projects there is so cheap that even current funding levels should have an outsized impact. Is the EA marketing of "$5,000 to save a life", based on GH&D programs in Africa, reinforcing this idea of cheapness?

Upsides

Large talent pool: The few jobs, fellowships and trainings that are announced now receive far more applications than there are places. Animal Welfare League received over 2,000 applications for a single role.

Efficiency and effectiveness: A small number of stronger groups are developing structures, projects and budgets that capture real costs and impact size, and that achieve key outcomes at lower cost. They may soon benchmark their cost-effectiveness against each other and against global groups. These groups remain the exception: most still lack the MEL capacity this requires.

New organizations: Much more can happen with new organizations, and it is exciting to see them springing up in new areas. To see what new organizations can add, compare Ghana's fish welfare space before and after SHARED (run by @Emmanuel Awuni) and AWASH (run by @Naveeth Basheer)