How philanthropy culture can benefit Kenya

Since time immemorial artists have always had patrons. On the other hand, all major academic institutions in the world, in the past and today, have always had patrons, in the form of external donors. Some philanthropy is behind many major creative endeavours and academic research that we so often celebrate.

Yet in Kenya, we continue to rely on individual effort, government support or donor backing, and hope, for the success of our creative artists and academic and research institutes. It has become something seemingly accepted to criticise local universities for not producing worthy research.

Often we read that Kenyan academics cannot hold their own in meetings of peers when it comes to research work. Conferences and seminars have become rare. A Google search will reveal that very few Kenyan scholars get published annually in either local, regional, African or global journals.

Donor organisations

The few who get published are either established scholars or researchers or those based in the West. But why is local scholarship so dim? Why is our creative community always in the intensive care unit financially? How come local research and creative communities are perpetually shadowing donor organisations?

One fact that has to be accepted by our artists and academics or researchers is that the government will never provide sufficient funding for them.

Governments are always under pressure to provide money for a range of projects, most of which have little or nothing to do with artistic creativity or pure academic research.

Considering that some academic research or artistic project may generally be considered crazy or not of any known immediate value, it is impossible to make a case for funding them, especially in a country such as Kenya where resources are in short supply.

So, although the government should still be expected, to some degree, to make money available for the creative industry and academic research, it is time this society looked elsewhere.

We are at a point in time in Kenya when we need local philanthropy to complement the government and external donors in support of local art and academic research. We need Kenyan equivalents of the Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, Ford, National Endowment for the Humanities or Atlantic Philanthropies, among many other American-based foundations.

These foundations or endowments have been instrumental in funding and driving research in areas ranging from the music, justice, health, technological innovation etc.

Many of these funds donate millions of dollars to universities in their countries for research projects, some of which would otherwise not have received funding from their governments. Yet the findings from some of this research are shared and benefit the whole society.

But a very valuable characteristic of these foundations is that most of the initial monies were left by individuals. These are people who had made money but decided to share it with the rest of the society either in their old age or after their death.

Thus such money is left in trusts and invested to produce a perpetual fund.

In many cases, it is old money which has been earned through industry and not mere speculation and fraud. Doubtless there is old money that is now funding good deeds that may disturb the conscience of some people, such as endowments from colonial settlers and farmers in places such as Africa and South America whose wealth was generated on the backs of African slaves.

However, one may be pragmatic and argue that at the least there is some kind of paying back should such money fund those in need, especially if they are descendants of slaves and the colonised.

So, how come we do not have old money in Kenya that is put into endowments, to support teaching, research and creative artists? Where do all the local billionaires or millionaires take their money when they die?

Why is it that it is so rare to read of a Kenyan millionaire who has dedicated some Sh50 million to the promotion of local music or for sports scholarship or for research in epilepsy or for an agricultural research institute in his home district which perpetually suffers from food deficiency?