The Cape already has a serious maritime economy across Saldanha, Cape Town and Simon’s Town. As global shipping routes become more volatile, the question is whether we understand the skills and industrial capability on our own coastline well enough to build for its next phase.

Oxfam’s latest inequality report puts negative wealth back at the centre of the conversation. For social investment, the harder question is what happens before opportunity arrives: whether public systems, markets and institutions allow people to retain value, build assets and move beyond permanent economic exposure.

There were fewer than 30 people in the first session of the ILO and ITCILO’s BRICS South-South Knowledge Series. The room was small enough to read. Present was a strong ILO contingent, a large Ethiopian group, formal Indonesian representation and a scattering of practitioners from elsewhere in the Global South. GrowZA appeared to be the only clearly South African organisation present. It was a serious room, but also a very particular kind of room. Most of the visible particip

Localisation, Gatekeeping and the Problem of Closed Development Networks

GrowZA has been selected to participate as an expert organisation in the ILO’s BRICS South-South Knowledge Series, contributing to a wider conversation on skills, social protection, digitalisation and the changing world of work.

I heard a story yesterday, and it made me think of how we manage aspects of the NGO space down here. Sometime in the 1970s, a father sends his son to the corner shop to buy a loaf of bread. The bread costs 19 cents. He gives the boy 20 cents. The shopkeeper doesn’t have a cent change, so he gives the boy a sweet instead. The boy gets home with the bread and the sweet. His father says nothing. He takes the sweet and puts it in a drawer. The next time the boy buys bread, the sa

USAID is retreating, BRICS is building new financial rails and Europe is repositioning. What does the changing development finance landscape mean for Africa?

Why Rational Organisations Keep Producing Irrational Systems South Africa’s civil society sector is often accused of being fragmented, territorial and too competitive. Fair enough. But put an organisation into a system where funding is scarce, relationships are currency, attribution determines who gets the next grant, collaboration carries risk and survival is never quite guaranteed, and then ask what a rational organisation would do. It will protect relationships, guard info

Aid is retreating across Africa, but capital is changing shape. What this shift means for philanthropy, CSI, development finance and African institutions.

Innovation gets attention, but institutional capacity determines whether good ideas survive. Craig Kensley examines why governance, systems and demand-side partnerships may be civil society’s most valuable assets.

Base Photo Credit: Airlink Facebook Page I was in the stadium on Saturday. We're used to flyovers at big rugby matches in South Africa. We've seen the helicopters, the big aircraft, the flag trailing behind. We know the drill. This wasn't that. Two Airlink aircraft glided over DHL Stadium and took the whole thing to another level. It was a showstopper. And, ridiculously, it wasn't even the highlight of the afternoon. That's how spoilt we are. Because the Bokke did pretty much

In 1994, RALI brought young South Africans together across old divides. Thirty-two years later, our children still need spaces to meet and learn.

Coffee black, Whiskey neat There's a truth about coffee. If you want to know whether it's any good, drink it black. No milk. No sugar. Nothing to soften it or disguise what you're actually drinking. Good coffee (and whiskey) survives the test. I've started applying the same rule to almost everything else. Strip away the language. The branding. The good intentions. The institutional confidence and ask What is this thing, really? And then the question I ask a lot when we're bu

What happens to civil society when AI makes development intelligence cheap? A reflection on why judgement, credibility, trust and stewardship may become the sector’s real currency.

A moment captured by our team during a community meeting in Tamale, Northern Ghana (2026) I discovered something slightly embarrassing recently. We had someone take a proper look at the GrowZA website. We wanted to understand what people were actually finding, reading and responding to. Turns out, it’s the writing. Our articles are doing a surprising amount of the work. They are driving traffic, pulling people into the site and, apparently, making GrowZA something of an outli

GrowZA runs year round impact programming for progressive corporate partners. This is how we #GrowZA There is a familiar conversation that takes place in corporate South Africa every July. "It's Mandela Month. What are we doing?" Someone suggests a school. Someone else knows an NGO. Marketing wants something visual. HR wants employees involved. Procurement is asked whether branded T-shirts and blankets can still be sourced before the end of the week. None of this is unusual.

For the past 6 years we’ve been walking into the same room: long tables, laptops open on too many PDFs, a handful of people arguing over definitions that most of the country will never see. That room is the SDG engine room. It is where South Africa decides what it can defend, statistically and politically, when it says “we are making progress”. GrowZA didn’t stumble into that room by accident. This is exactly the space we were built for: the gap between high‑level ambition an

6 years ago GrowZA made a bet on a capability, not a cause. We are proudly cause agnostic. We believed that in a world increasingly shaped by interconnected challenges, the ability to connect people, ideas, institutions and resources would become as valuable as subject matter expertise itself. We believed that translation is valuable and that convening power = market influence. We bet that the capacity to move between sectors, disciplines and communities would become a strate

How to spot the passengers at the top, and make more room for the people doing the work. We don’t believe the development sector has a talent problem. We think there's a passenger problem. In almost every room we're in, we meet smart, grounded people who care deeply about communities and who are willing to do slow, unglamorous work. The talent is there. The commitment is there. What's we’re missing is oxygen at the top. Too many key seats are occupied by what could be called

Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI, lands squarely in South Africa’s townships, server rooms and grant queues. This article explores what “human dignity, truth and freedom” mean in an age where communities are wired into digital infrastructures they didn’t design, can’t see and rarely get to question – and highlights concrete examples like the Absa–Maharishi Cybersecurity Academy and blind cyber graduates as signs of a different, community‑centred digita