Who We Are

Our Mission

To strengthen the people, institutions and systems that power lasting locally led change across Africa.

Our Story

A major sector-wide shutdown in 2025, including Planned Parenthood Global, where our team contributed for over a decade, exposed the fragility of externally driven models and reinforced the need to shift power and leadership locally.

Rather than walk away, we chose to respond and create a new system that centers power and resources to the local communities closest to the world's most challenging problems. Third Sector Builders was born out of that opportunity - a Pan-African not-for-profit advisory and implementation support partner rooted in justice and equity.

The Opportunity: Resetting the Development System

The development space continues to struggle with fragile, externally-driven initiatives that fail to sustain impact, while local changemakers remain undervalued, underfunded, and overlooked despite their critical expertise, due to persistent mistrust and perceived organizational weaknesses.

The wind-down and contraction of large internationally driven development portfolios in 2025 revealed a crisis in the sector: systems built around external funding priorities and leadership collapse quickly when those actors withdraw. The abrupt exits exposed gaps in continuity, local capacity, and resilience, reinforcing a critical lesson that sustainable impact demands approaches anchored in local leadership, locally held power, and systems built to endure beyond external cycles.

"We didn't just lose jobs—we saw an externally driven system unravel. So we decided to build one that actually works for our communities, not just around them." — Founding Team, Third Sector Builders