Freedom is uncomfortable

On 14 May 2026, I had the chance to deliver the keynote at the Laureus Hub Connect Summit in Stellenbosch – the second of three summits Laureus is convening nationally with leaders from South Africa’s sport‑for‑good and broader NPO community.

GrowZA is a social investment agency that works with NPOs, corporates and funders to design more honest, more institutional responses to South Africa’s realities so when I stepped onto that stage, I didn’t want to offer another comfortable talk about “resilience” or “innovation”. I wanted us to ask how South Africa actually works – and what that means for those of us trying to change it from the outside‑in.

Most national conversations in South Africa are still organised from the inside out – from boardrooms, suburbs and policy forums looking at “communities” as problems to be solved or beneficiaries to be reached.

An outside‑in view starts somewhere else: in townships, informal settlements, backyard rooms and hybrid livelihoods where most people actually live.

When you start there, a few things shift:

• What counts as “normal” looks very different.

• What counts as “success” is less about formal jobs and more about viable livelihoods.

• The constraints you see are less about attitudes and more about institutions.

From that vantage point, it becomes hard to avoid a simple, uncomfortable conclusion: South Africa is still organised as a country of insiders and outsiders, even three decades into democracy.

“Freedom is uncomfortable”

To make that point tangible, I opened with an image that has stayed with me: a photograph I took of a boy walking to school under a tattered South African flag, alongside the ornate portrait of Winnie Madikizela‑Mandela by Loyiso Mkize featured in the gripping documentary - The Trials of Winnie Mandela recently released on Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZydib--qw4

Across the slide I wrote: “Freedom is uncomfortable.”

I meant a few things by that:

• Freedom is uncomfortable because it exposes what hasn’t changed beneath the rituals of democracy.

• It forces us to sit with contradiction – with figures like Winnie, where courage and cruelty, sacrifice and abuse of power, sit side by side.

• It asks whether political freedom has become lived, material freedom for most South Africans, or whether too many still experience democracy as something that happens somewhere else.

  
  

For me, that discomfort is not a problem to be avoided. It’s the starting point for any work that wants to be honest.

Insiders, outsiders and the rules of the game

From there I drew on Douglass North and Steven Friedman to give language to what many of us see every day.

• Insiders are people whose livelihoods are anchored in the formal economy – their work, income, documentation and address fit the “rules of the game”. They are legible to banks, HR systems, the tax authority and procurement departments. Transaction costs are lower; rights are enforceable.

• Outsiders are people whose economic and social lives sit outside or at the edge of those rules – informal traders, piece‑workers, survivalist businesses, people juggling multiple fragile income streams without ever quite crossing the formal threshold. For them, the same rules that protect insiders can raise costs or block access completely.

• Beyond both lie the unemployed – the millions with no foothold at all in the labour market, formal or informal.

  
  

Steven Friedman’s uncomfortable insight is that South Africa is still run as a club. Under apartheid the club was whites‑only; today it is more racially mixed, but it is still a club. The forms changed, the franchise expanded, but many of the deeper rules that distribute opportunity, voice and protection did not.

Douglass North reminds us that these rules are not neutral. Institutions are “the rules of the game”, and they are path‑dependent: they reflect old bargains and are defended by the coalitions that benefit from them. If the rules stay the same, exclusion stays the same.

That has direct implications for how we, as NPOs and funders, understand our work.

What this means for a room full of NPOs

The Laureus audience was full of practitioners – coaches, club managers, programme leads, NPO directors – not armchair commentators. So I turned the lens onto us.

I argued that the NPO sector already has enormous latent power, but we often don’t see ourselves that way:

• We move billions of rand each year in public, corporate, lottery and philanthropic money.

• We are not just delivery vehicles; we are a billion‑rand R&D ecosystem experimenting with ways to tackle TB, HIV, violence, exclusion and youth unemployment.

• We operate closest to the outsider realities most policy debates misdiagnose.

  
  

And yet we often behave as if we are small, peripheral and permanently grateful for crumbs. We speak eloquently about “systemic change”, but we negotiate our work as if we are running marginal projects on the edges of someone else’s system.

On the Laureus stage, I said that we need to shift from a philosopher mindset to a practitioner mindset.

Three disciplines I think we need

I suggested three disciplines that I’m trying to apply in my own work at GrowZA, and that I believe the sector needs if we’re serious about changing the rules of the game.

1. Map rules, not just actors

We’re very good at stakeholder maps. We’re less disciplined about rule maps.

In every domain we work in – sport, education, youth, township economy – we need to be able to name:

• The formal rules: laws, policies, funding formulas, procurement criteria.

• The informal rules: norms, gatekeepers, unwritten “how it works here” scripts.

Until we can see those, we are mostly describing symptoms, not leverage points.

2. Identify leverage points

Once the rules are visible, we can ask: which small changes could dramatically lower costs or increase protection for outsiders?

Often these are not grand constitutional questions. They are smaller shifts:

• Documentation requirements for grants or bursaries.

• Procurement thresholds that exclude informal suppliers.

• Credit‑scoring criteria that write off whole neighbourhoods.

• Payment terms that kill micro‑suppliers’ cash flow.

• Reporting burdens that only big NGOs can meet.

These are exactly the spaces where NPOs and funders are already in relationship – and where we can design smarter terms.

3. Design work as rule experiments

Instead of treating programmes as sealed “projects”, I argued for designing them as tests of alternative rules.

• New ways to contract and support community coaches.

• New models for bringing informal enterprises into procurement.

• New M&E conditions that don’t crush small organisations.

In that frame, the key learning question after a pilot is not only “Did it work?”, but “What did this show us about how the rules could work differently – and who needs to change theirs?”

This is also where the CSR / CSI distinction bites. Too often CSI has been the polite philanthropic add‑on while the core business rules stay untouched. What if we treated CSI as R&D for better CSR – and positioned NPOs as the development labs helping rewrite how companies hire, procure, price and partner?

We are not small – we must take our righful place

One number I shared that seemed to shift the room came from the HSRC’s latest R&D fact sheet: in 2020/21, South African NPOs spent around R1.57 billion on research and experimental development, up from R170 million a decade earlier.

In other words, this sector is not a hobby space. It’s a serious institutional actor.

For me, that is the invitation: to start seeing ourselves – and acting – as rule‑shapers, not just service providers.

Walking away from the Hub Connect stage

I left the Stellenbosch summit grateful for three things:

• The freedom Laureus gave me to speak honestly, not just politely.

• The way the room – NPO leaders from across the country – leaned into discomfort rather than retreating from it.

• The sense that many of us are tired of being treated as subcontractors and are ready to think and act as institutional players.

  
  

This was the second of three Hub Connect stops nationally. By the time the series wraps, my hope is that more of us will be asking, in our own organisations not only “How do we serve people outside the clubhouse?” but also “How do we help write different rules?”

Because in the end, that’s how I understand our calling at GrowZA, and in this broader ecosystem: not just to keep people alive in an unfair game, but to help change the game itself.

This is how we #GrowZA

Written by Craig Kensley, Executive Director of GrowZA Social Investment Agency.