What I Learned Meeting 50+ Africa-Based Members Face-to-Face
Written by Jessika Ava, MS, MPA Thrive Philanthropy CEO
Meeting in Person
I just returned from AVA Summit Ghana, where our team met in person with more than 50 grantees and Thrive Africa members from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Zanzibar, and Tanzania. We also hit a milestone that's been years in the making: Thrive Philanthropy's entire global team was together, in one room, for the very first time.
Why We Built Thrive Africa
To understand why this trip mattered so much, you have to go back to 2018.
That year, I noticed something we couldn't ignore: almost no grant applications were coming in from African organizations. It wasn't a lack of passion or vision. It was a lack of access — to funding networks, to training, to the kind of infrastructure that lets a grassroots campaign become a movement.
So we asked why, and then we built an answer: Thrive Africa, a department of Thrive Philanthropy dedicated to supporting the growth of the plant-based movement across the continent. It now includes:
● Thrive Africa Accelerator — training organizations in how to launch effective advocacy campaigns
● Thrive Africa Vegan Restaurant Week and Thrive Africa Vegan School Lunch Campaign — the world's first and second pan-African-wide vegan campaigns, ran by organizations in any African country
● Thrive Africa Vegan Women's Initiative — upskilling women-identified plant-based advocates and creating funding and leadership pathways built specifically for them
Since we launched this work in 2020, we've tracked exponential growth in vegan advocacy across the continent. According to Thrive's most recent impact data, 67% of African countries now have an expanding plant-based movement, and Thrive Africa's Accelerator alone has drawn nearly 1,000 registered members across 40 countries. We consider that proof the model works. But numbers on a page only tell part of the story — the rest of it, I saw firsthand in Accra.
Inside AVA Summit Ghana
Meeting 50+ Grantees and Members in Person
There's a reason we prioritize site visits even when they're expensive and logistically complicated: nothing replaces sitting across the table from the people doing the work. Video calls and grant reports tell us what happened. Being in the room tells us how — the constraints organizers are working around, the coalition politics, the local wins that never make it into a report because they seemed too small to mention, but weren't.
Meeting grantees from multiple countries in one place also let us do something we can't do virtually: introduce organizers to each other. Some of these groups had been reading about each other's campaigns for years without ever meeting.
The Reverse Pitch
This year, we piloted something new: the Reverse Pitch. Instead of grantees pitching Thrive for funding, we flipped the dynamic — our team pitched organizations on how Thrive could support their work, giving them the space to evaluate whether we're the right partner for where they're headed. It's a small structural change with a big philosophical point behind it: grantee-centered philanthropy means treating grantees as decision-makers, not applicants.
Thrive Family Photo
We also held the annual Thrive Family Photo - Africa version. It's a small ritual, but it matters — a visual reminder every year that this is a growing family of movement-builders, not a portfolio of transactions.
Thrive Africa Vegan Women’s Initiative Members met in person and used the time together to set their own direction for the initiative's next year. If our theory of change means anything, it's that the people closest to the work should be the ones shaping it. Watching this group set their own agenda was one of the clearest proof points of that theory I've seen in years.
Closing Ceremony
At the AVA Summit closing ceremony, our Africa Co-Manager and I spoke about Thrive's impact across the continent and the momentum building behind Africa's vegan movement. Standing in that room, describing the exponential growth we've documented since 2018 to the very people who created it, was one of the more moving moments of my career.
Our Global Team, Together for the First Time
And quietly, alongside all of this, something else happened: Thrive Philanthropy's staff — spread across 3 continents and normally connected only through screens — were finally in the same place at the same time. For an organization built on relationship-driven grantmaking, that milestone mattered more than I expected it to.
Exponential Growth
And what has all this led to? An exponential growth in the plant-based movement across Africa. Since 2018 we’ve observed exponential growth in the number of grant worth plant-based campaigns across the region, coming out of our Thrive Africa projects.
It’s a Fundraising Story, Not Just a Travel Story
Philanthropy that never leaves its own office tends to fund what's easy to explain in a grant report, not what's actually needed on the ground. Site visits are how we catch what a quarterly update misses. They're how we build the trust that lets a grantee tell us honestly when a campaign isn't working, instead of only reporting the wins. They’re how we better understand how politics, socioeconomics, culture shape advocacy.
To date, Thrive has helped catalyze the plant-based movement in 67% of African countries and moved roughly $3M+ in grants across 79 countries and six continents globally. None of it happens without funders who are willing to invest not just in campaigns, but in the relationships and infrastructure behind them.
That's where you come in.
Will You Help Us Continue This Global Work?
Every dollar you give to Thrive Philanthropy let’s us catalyze the global plant-based movement — funding the campaigns our grantees are building and the capacity work that makes those campaigns stronger.
To be a part of this journey, donate to Thrive Philanthropy →
If you'd like to see the full scope of what this funding makes possible, I'd also encourage you to look through our 2025 Global Annual Report and our 2025 Africa Impact Report.
With gratitude,
Jessika Ava, MS, MPA
CEO, Thrive Philanthropy