CAPSI alumna Lerato Mashianoke says innovations emerging from African contexts carry lessons global institutions urgently need
“There are places where inequality becomes so normal that you almost mistake it for the natural order of things.”
For Lerato Mashianoke, that place was Tzaneen in Limpopo a town she describes as “surrounded by mountains and mango farms and a kind of lushness that feels almost excessive.”
“It is genuinely beautiful,” she says. “It is also a place where deep poverty and deep inequality are so woven into the landscape that you can grow up mistaking them for the natural order of things.”
Today, Mashianoke serves as Programme Manager for Africa and the Middle East at Fondation CHANEL in London, leading strategy, grantmaking, partnerships, and feminist funding initiatives across diverse regions and complex political contexts.
But long before global boardrooms, international strategy documents, and multimillion-dollar grant portfolios, there was a curious young girl observing the contradictions around her.
“I watched the women around me hold entire worlds together with their hands, their labour, their love, and their sheer refusal to give up,” she reflects. “And I watched those same women be silenced in spaces where their voices were most needed.”
She credits her mother and grandmothers, Nkhesane and Matsie, for shaping her understanding of dignity, resilience, and womanhood long before she encountered feminist theory academically.
“They did not wait for permission to matter,” she says. “They did not shrink.”
That foundation would later shape not only her academic journey, but her entire philosophy of philanthropy and justice.
Mashianoke’s educational journey took her through institutions including the University of Pretoria, University of South Africa, London School of Economics and Political Science, and eventually Centre on African Philanthropy and Social Investment at Wits Business School.
Her decision to study African philanthropy at an African institution was intentional.
“I was not interested in going to a European or American university to be taught about African philanthropy through a framework built somewhere else,” she explains. “I had experienced enough of that dynamic professionally. I was not going to reproduce it in my own academic formation.”
At CAPSI, she says, African philanthropy was not treated as secondary or emerging.
“The Ubuntu tradition, communal resource sharing, and African ways of giving were centred,” she says. “That is more radical than it sounds.”
She describes her time at CAPSI as transformative, not because it gave her all the answers, but because it gave her language, rigour, and intellectual grounding for questions she had already been carrying for years.
“The programme gave me time,” she says. “Time to pause, to read slowly, to sit with ideas rather than sprint past them.”
Before her Master’s degree, she says she already understood grantmaking practically. But the programme sharpened her ability to critically analyse the systems behind it.
“I saw organisations stretched thin by reporting requirements designed for bureaucrats, not movement builders,” she says. “I saw the constant performance of gratitude that grantees had to maintain to keep relationships alive.”
“The programme gave me the scholarly language and analytical framework to challenge these systems systematically.”
Today, Mashianoke works at the intersection of philanthropy, women’s rights, and social justice, spaces she says cannot be separated from questions of power.
“Feminist philanthropy starts with a question,” she says. “Who has power, who doesn’t, and what are we actually doing about that?”
For her, philanthropy must move beyond charity and toward solidarity.
“It means standing with organisations that conventional funding systems routinely exclude because they are small, because they are radical, because they cannot produce three years of audited financials,” she explains.
She is particularly passionate about long-term, flexible, trust-based funding models.
“Real solidarity works toward its own obsolescence,” she says. “It is not interested in creating relationships of dependency forever.”
Mashianoke is also deeply critical of what she calls “performative philanthropy.”
“Transformative philanthropy is accountable to communities,” she says. “Performative philanthropy is accountable primarily to its own reputation,”
“You know transformative philanthropy when you experience it because it feels like partnership, not patronage.”
Across her career, Mashianoke has worked closely with feminist movements, activists, and community organisations across Africa and the Global South.
One of her strongest convictions is that African institutions and movements must be recognised as producers of knowledge, not merely recipients of it.
“The innovations emerging from African contexts carry lessons that global institutions urgently need,” she says.
She believes institutions like CAPSI have a major role to play in reshaping global philanthropy conversations over the next decade.
“For too long, global philanthropy debates have been shaped largely by Northern institutions,” she explains. “CAPSI disrupts that.”
As CAPSI marks 10 years since the founding of the Chair in African Philanthropy, Mashianoke describes the milestone as significant and deeply emotional.
“Many African institutions do not survive,” she says. “Not because the ideas were wrong, but because the conditions are hard.”
“The fact that CAPSI is still here, still producing graduates, still shaping the field — that matters deeply.”
She hopes the next decade will see CAPSI amplify African-centred knowledge production globally while continuing to build community among the next generation of African philanthropic leaders.
“The next generation needs spaces that take their knowledge seriously,” she says.
When asked what she would say to young African women aspiring to shape global systems, Mashianoke’s answer is immediate and unwavering.
“You belong in every room you enter,” she says, “and every room you have not yet been invited into.”
“Do not wait for permission.”
She encourages young women to invest deeply in knowledge, political understanding, and relationships rooted in solidarity.
“Your lived experience is your most important credential,” she says. “But pairing it with rigorous knowledge makes you formidable.”
And finally, she speaks about rest, joy, and wellbeing with the same seriousness she speaks about strategy and systems change.
“Your wellbeing, your joy, your rest, these are not luxuries,” she says. “They are part of how we win.”
As she reflects on her own journey, from Tzaneen to global philanthropy leadership, Mashianoke says what makes her proud is not simply the positions she has held, but the integrity that has guided her throughout.
“I remain anchored to the same conviction,” she says. “That the purpose of this work is justice.”
“And if my journey affirms for even one young woman from the southern soil that she can think globally, lead boldly, and shape the systems that shape us,” she adds, “then I will consider that my deepest contribution.”
