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?

Why is it that when some rich man’s mother dies there is an elaborate funeral conducted which simply eats up money that otherwise would have been invested in a trust fund for research into the disease that might have claimed the mother?

What exactly do the “foundations” associated with our politicians do? When one donates 50 bags of maize and 20 bags of beans to a hunger-stricken community every year, is such a person and his “foundation” really helping the community? Or are they perpetuating a dependency cycle?

What is the sense of making so much money and then dying intestate? The wives and offspring, legal and illicit, relatives and friends plus lawyers are then left to squander the money in endless court battles.

Yet some of the money could have been well spent in supporting many local initiatives like fighting diseases, ignorance, poverty, injustice, environmental destruction etc.

Wealthy Kenyans, and people who have made their money in Kenya and from Kenyans, need to start giving back to the country and its citizens. Local research institutes, universities and schools often have had to suspend programmes because donors have withdrawn their support.

Many brilliant Kenyan scholars have had to peddle and eventually lose innovative research to outsiders simply because there are no local donors or endowments that would support their work.

Amazing ideas

A successful Kenyan artist who has not been supported by some donor money from abroad, or in the recent past by some one-off grant from a corporate organisation, is a rare finding.

Many artists with amazing ideas and projects walk around town with forlorn faces, hoping that some magnanimous donor will come along to help.

That local corporate entities have become more prominent in funding some academic research and artists is commendable. But this is a very small dose of the required treatment for a problem that will afflict us for a very long time.

We cannot continue hoping that non-Kenyans will continue to pour money into our country to fund even the most basic of research. Arts are about our culture. What are we telling foreigners when our own rich do not bother about being patrons of our cultural producers?

Wealthy Kenyan women and men need to leave their names around in the form of endowments so that if I want to study in detail the “entertainment cultures in Nairobi in the 1970s” I can apply for funding from a local fund whose money was made by some businessman who ran a chain of entertainment spots in Nairobi in the 1970s.

Many are those who have made millions of shillings from tea in Central, Nyanza, Western and Rift Valley provinces. Shouldn’t one of them put away a few of those millions to fund research in “innovative methods in food production and storage” in such places where most land has been taken up by tea plantations?

We need more local trust funds to complement what endowments such as Rahimtulla Trust, Rattansi Education Fund, Gandhi Smarak Nidhi Fund and a few others have been doing.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. Tom.odhiambo@uonbi.ac.ke