On a Saturday afternoon in the Livingstonia-Phoka highlands of Rumphi District, Malawi, several hundred people gather to watch a football match. Spectators contribute through entry fees, teams contribute registration fees, and local businesses provide in-kind support such as prizes and logistical assistance. By the time the final whistle blows, the crowd has collectively contributed to something beyond the scoreline: funds that will help build a toilet block at a local school or rehabilitate an irrigation system that guarantees families’ food security during the dry season.

This is Bola na Chitukuko – Football for Development, an expression of a broader shift underway in this corner of northern Malawi. Rise for Phoka Community Foundation is demonstrating that communities can turn everyday social spaces into platforms for collective investment, rather than waiting for external funding to shape their futures.

The Asset That Was Always There

At its heart, the Phoka experience challenges a persistent assumption in development: that poor or rural communities are mainly recipients of support. The evidence from Phoka points in another direction. When trust, structure, and accountability are present, communities can become co-investors in their own development priorities.

When Rise for Phoka conducted community engagement processes across 16 Village Development Committees (VDCs) in the Phoka area, the findings challenged a familiar narrative. Communities did not simply present lists of what they lacked. They identified priority projects such as school sanitation facilities, irrigation infrastructure, teacher housing, childcare centres, elderly support and, critically, they offered to contribute labour, bricks, sand, stones, fundraising, and time. The barrier was not a lack of generosity or commitment. It was the absence of a trusted, structured system through which those contributions could be organised, pooled, and directed towards collective goals.

This aligns with the principles of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), a framework developed by McKnight and Kretzmann that asks not what communities lack, but what they already possess. Rise for Phoka’s engagement confirmed what ABCD has long argued: the assets are there. They simply need a home.

Building the Home: The Village Development Fund

That home is the Village Development Fund (VDF), a community-led financing mechanism that brings local contributions, external donations, partnership resources, and fundraising proceeds into one common fund. Communities identify priorities through Village Action Plans, contribute what they can, and receive grants to implement projects themselves. Governance sits with community structures, ensuring accountability flows downward to residents rather than upward to donors.

The VDF is established to support projects across the 16 villages in Phoka, with community co-contributions averaging 50% of total project costs, a figure that demonstrates genuine local ownership rather than token participation.

Rise for Phoka is itself in transition, moving from a project implementer to a grant-making Community Foundation. This is not a small shift. It requires new systems, new relationships with communities, and a fundamentally different understanding of the organisation’s role as a convener and resource mobiliser than a doer.

When the Football Pitch Becomes a Philanthropic Platform

Bola na Chitukuko illustrates the VDF model at its most visible. Football already brings communities together, generates excitement, and attracts large audiences in the Phoka highlands. Rather than creating a new mobilisation channel, Rise for Phoka asked a simple question: what if the community channelled what already exists?

Through spectator fees, team registrations, and sponsorships, 100 matches are expected to generate MWK 10,000,000 (US$5,000) for the Village Development Fund. These resources will go directly towards projects prioritised by local communities, including a school sanitation block in Phoka, irrigation rehabilitation in Lumbwezi, an Health Survellance Assistant (HSA) house in Mzinga, and menstrual hygiene support for over 1,000 girls across local schools.

The football field has become a platform for civic education and collective action. The spectator who pays their entry fee is, perhaps without fully realising it, practising community philanthropy.

The Deeper Lesson: Trust, Transparency, and Tangible Results

Rise for Phoka’s experience of local giving predates the VDF. Over recent years, the organisation mobilised resources from community members and supporters for a range of initiatives: mattresses for girls’ hostels, classroom construction at Gavala Primary School and elderly companionship support for 200 senior citizens, with total local contributions reaching MWK 5,000,000 (US$2,500). The lesson from each initiative was consistent: people give when they trust the system, understand the purpose, and see results.

Community Foundations exist precisely to institutionalise local trust and generosity. They provide the organisational structures through which community assets and local giving can be mobilised, the accountability mechanisms through which donors and communities can see resources translated into tangible outcomes, and the continuity through which philanthropy becomes an enduring practice rather than a one-off intervention. Research on community philanthropy demonstrates that community foundations strengthen local ownership, build institutional capacity, and cultivate trust by embedding decision-making and resource allocation within communities themselves (Kilmurray & Hodgson, 2015; Richardson, 2013; Avrorina & Knight, 2021).

A Model for an Uncertain Moment

External development financing across sub-Saharan Africa is under pressure. Aid budgets are tightening, donor priorities are shifting, and communities that have long depended on external resources are being asked to find their own footing. The question is not whether this transition will happen, but whether communities will be supported to navigate it well.

Rise for Phoka’s answer is practical: build local systems now. The Village Development Fund is not a replacement for partnerships or donor support; both remain important. It is an insurance policy against dependency, and an investment in the civic infrastructure through which communities can continuously mobilise and direct their own resources.

The goal is not simply to fund projects. It is to build a culture in which giving to your community is as natural as attending a football match. In Phoka, that culture is growing steadily. The next chapter belongs to the communities themselves.