Black Coffee

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 building things: What do you get if you win?

I ask it of clients. I ask it of GrowZA. I ask it of myself.

Because you can become very good at a game without ever stopping to ask whether you want the prize. This is true in business, relationships and for me, life in general.

So I asked it about our writing. If we became really good at the development thought-leadership game, what would we "win"?

More followers. More panels. More invitations into rooms full of other people who also get invited into rooms. Economy flights. Mid-range hotels. Conference food. Plastic name badges.

Well done.

I'm being deliberately provocative, but there is something underneath it.

Development has a strange capacity for turning good intentions into theatre.

I have fun with this in my "I've been in meetings like this..." posts on instagram.

Community voice without communities in the room.

Collaboration while everyone protects their territory.

Systems change with a project budget and a twelve-month funding cycle.

We should be able to laugh at that. But we should also ask what it tells us.

Because beneath all the language, frameworks and institutional choreography, there is another layer that interests me much more.

How do things actually work?

Take something as common as a community rugby club.

We can describe it as sport. Or youth development. Or social cohesion.

But when you "drink it black"?

It's a place people return to. A network across generations. Coaches who know families. Information moving between people. Identity. Trust. Belonging. Opportunity. and sometimes gansterism...

The rugby is real. So are the systems underneath it.

We think about this as civic architecture, and the relationships running through it as community fibre. Often latent assets with the potential to be activated as capital.

You see it in schools, churches, stokvels, community organisations, libraries, sports fields and informal networks.

Communities already have systems.

That's where we want the writing to go. Which is why the GrowZA Blog is now GrowZA Editorial.

We'll still write about social investment, philanthropy, youth, technology, work and institutions.

But we've also been looking wider.

Sport. Place. Belonging. Civic infrastructure. Informal networks. Power. The small systems beneath the big ones.

Everything that happens in communities matters to development.

And not everything dressed in development language is necessarily useful.

So the editorial instinct is quite simple. Drink it black.

What is actually here?

What is actually happening?

Who benefits?

And what do you get if you win?

Welcome to GrowZA Editorial.

Ideas. Analysis. African Futures.

This is how we #GrowZA