Beyond Good Intentions: Why PRA Exists

The Philanthropy Reform Alliance (PRA) is an Africa-led initiative founded by development practitioners who believe that transforming development requires more than good intentions, better policies, or new funding models. It requires a deeper examination of how power, relationships, decisions, and everyday practices shape the way development is experienced.

PRA was inspired in part by the insight from Professor James Thomas’s But I Meant Well: Unlearning Colonial Ways of Doing Good: that good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes when the systems, assumptions, and behaviours behind them remain unchanged.

Across the development and humanitarian sectors, commitments to equity, localisation, partnership, and the Sustainable Development Goals continue to grow. Yet a gap remains between policy ambition and lived reality. Many communities closest to the challenges still have limited influence over the decisions, resources, and systems that affect their lives.

At the same time, the sector is facing financial pressure, rising demands for sustainable impact, and growing calls for locally led and contextually grounded solutions. This creates both urgency and opportunity to rethink not only how development is funded, but how it is practised.

PRA exists to bridge the gap between intention and practice.

We create spaces for reflection, unlearning, accompaniment, and practice-based learning that help practitioners and institutions examine how development systems function in real life — and begin shifting them toward greater trust, solidarity, equity, and local leadership.

At the heart of our work is a simple belief: systems are made of people. They are designed, maintained, and reproduced through everyday choices, assumptions, behaviours, incentives, and institutional cultures. This is why PRA focuses on practitioners. To change systems, we must also change how the people within them think, relate, decide, fund, partner, and lead.

Our Mission

To transform philanthropy and development practice through collective unlearning of coloniality, extractive systems, and inherited assumptions about power, partnership, and progress — and to create new possibilities for doing good rooted in mutuality, dignity, justice, shared power, and shared human flourishing.

Our Vision

A humanitarian and development ecosystem rooted in solidarity, community leadership, and shared flourishing

Our Ethical Foundation

Humility

We can be part of unequal systems without intending harm.

Specificity

We will name the policy, process, incentive or behavior — not only speak in generalities.

Reciprocity

We ask how accountability flows back to the people and communities in whose name we act.

Non-Extraction

People, communities, stories and knowledge are not raw material for our learning. We do not extract experiences, stories or knowledge for our own benefit, recognition or institutional learning without considering consent, ownership, reciprocity and accountability.

Shift in Practice

We will connect reflection to a concrete shift in behaviour, process, resource or decision-making power.

Practice What We Preach

PRA holds itself to the same standards it advocates for: transparency, shared ownership, community accountability, and continuous self-reflection are non-negotiable features of our own organizational culture.

We believe meaningful change begins with honesty, is sustained through trust, and is driven by those closest to the work.

Our Approach

01

Surface

Make the familiar visible: Notice and name assumptions, beliefs, behaviours, relationships, and institutional practices we have come to see as normal

02

Disrupt

Question what we have learned to accept. Interrogate the assumptions and practices that reproduce unequal power, extraction, hierarchy, and dependency. Create space to question what we have inherited, whose interests it serves, and what we may need to let go of.

03

Reframe

Explore alternative ways of relating, partnering, leading, and making decisions grounded in trust, solidarity, and local leadership.

04

Enable Practice Change

Translate reflection into action through shifts in behaviors, systems, relationships, and institutional practice.

What Success Looks Like

For PRA, success is not only structural reform. It is also seen in the quieter but meaningful shifts that change how development is understood, practised, and experienced.

Success looks like practitioners and institutions becoming more conscious of how power, privilege, incentives, and institutional norms shape decisions and partnerships.

It looks like more honest conversations about trust, accountability, risk, knowledge, and local leadership.

It looks like changes in everyday practice: whose voice is heard, whose knowledge is valued, how decisions are made, how partnerships are held, and how resources are shared.

Ultimately, PRA works toward a development ecosystem shaped by:

Solidarity over charity
Partnership over patronage
Community leadership over external control

PRA Secretariat

The PRA Secretariat holds and stewards the day-to-day work of the Philanthropy Reform Alliance. We are a small team committed to creating spaces for unlearning, building solidarity-based partnerships, strengthening locally led organisations, and reimagining how philanthropy and development practice can be rooted in trust, humility, and shared power.