Nicky Le Roux: On Holding Complexity and Funding Feminist Futures
Listen to the interview
Share
Jump to theme
Nicky Le Roux: On Holding Complexity and Funding Feminist Futures
Nicky Le Roux sees South Africa’s beauty, but she also sees its contradictions.
In South Africa, some of the world’s most progressive laws exist alongside some of the highest rates of violence against women. The promise of freedom often collides with the daily realities of poverty and exclusion.
At the Ford Foundation’s Southern Africa office, Nicky’s role is to hold this complexity while pushing for transformation. Under her stewardship, Ford’s philanthropy takes a path different from the traditional: funding isn’t treated as a transaction to be executed and concluded, but as a practice of solidarity. It’s the often-unseen labour of feminist infrastructure-building: supporting movements that cannot always formalise but whose work is essential; convening those on the front lines to think beyond immediate crises; and insisting that political systems, however imperfect, remain accountable to the people they were built to serve.
As I interview Nicky, I hear a voice that carries both conviction and pragmatism – the kind that comes from having seen how change unfolds, stalls, and still, despite everything, moves forward. There is an energy, an excitement that bubbles up when she talks about what’s possible, even as she remains clear-eyed about the challenges ahead. I get the sense that it’s her intentionality – the way she approaches problem-solving with clarity, reflection, vision, and the courage to pivot – that powers and sustains her team’s work.
“It’s the magic of being able to unlock these connections. It’s given me access to do the kind of things I only dreamed about.”
In this conversation, Nicky speaks candidly about backlash – how the gains of feminist movements can trigger resistance, how young men’s exclusion can become fertile ground for misogyny, and how movements that threaten gender justice are gaining strength across the continent. She reflects on what it means to work within systems without becoming part of their problems, and why it’s worth staying in the room even when change feels slow.
How philanthropy can fund change, not just projects
In 2025, philanthropy is under more scrutiny than ever before. There is a growing recognition that how philanthropy shows up matters: who sets the agenda, who holds the power, and who gets to define success.
On trust-based philanthropy
At the Ford Foundation, trust-based philanthropy is a deliberate strategy to shift power, while recognising the responsibility that comes with it.
At the heart of Ford’s approach is a commitment to multi-year, flexible support that allows communities to lead, while ensuring organisations have the institutional strength to endure and adapt. “Almost 90% of our office’s funding is flexible funding,” Nicky says. It’s not about chasing deliverables; it’s about building the infrastructure that movements need to sustain change.” In practice, this means helping partners navigate leadership transitions, rethink strategy, or recalibrate when growth becomes a burden rather than a goal. Through its Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) program, Ford pairs five years of flexible funding with targeted support to strengthen strategies, teams, and systems – a model shown to deepen organisational resilience and communities ties across sectors and sizes. Tools like the Organisation Management Tool put decision-making power back where it belongs, inviting staff, boards, and leaders to assess their organisation’s health and set priorities based on lived realities rather than donor assumptions.
“Movements working to end violence and marginalisation cannot sustain their impact if the people leading them are operating from a place of exhaustion and unprocessed grief.”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the urgency of this approach into sharp relief. As the pandemic swept through communities, Nicky began every call with partners by asking how they were doing. “Our partners would just break down and say, we lost our driver, who has been with us for 10 years, and he doesn’t have a pension fund,” she recalls. “One partner said that 35 family members around the institution had passed away. It was just devastating.”
The crisis magnified personal grief and collective trauma already carried by those working in the sector. For Ford’s Southern Africa office, it became an inflection point that deepened an existing commitment: wellness and healing were not add-ons, but critical infrastructure for sustaining impact. “Movements working to end violence and marginalisation cannot sustain their impact if the people leading them are operating from a place of exhaustion and unprocessed grief,” Nicky explains.
Supporting movements on their terms
Supporting feminist movements on their terms
What does it take for philanthropy to support grassroots movements without remaking them in its own image? Nicky and I talk about the hidden costs of formalisation – how governance structures, compliance paperwork, and rigid reporting can drain the agility that makes movements effective in the first place.
“Our main focus was on smaller organisations because we also knew, from our understanding, that’s where the change was happening, but where very little of the resources were going.”
At Ford, this tension is met with a practical strategy: working through trusted intermediaries who can bridge the gap between funders and hyper-local movements that traditional grant systems often ignore. It is a choice that acknowledges where change is truly happening – and where resources are often absent.“Our main focus was on smaller organisations because we also knew, from our understanding, that’s where the change was happening, but where very little of the resources were going.”
This approach challenges the assumption that the legitimacy of a movement requires institutionalisation. Ford’s stance is clear: if movements want to remain informal, they should be able to, retaining the speed and responsiveness essential to the frontlines while intermediaries handle the administrative load. “We encourage movements if they want to remain movements, to remain…let the intermediary run with all of your stuff, but continue to do the work that you do without worrying about bank accounts and NGOs certificates.”
It is a philosophy put into practice through initiatives like Ford’s Weaving Resilience, program which Nicky has helped steward in Southern Africa. Here, local partners come together to support grassroots movements with the practical resources they need – strategic relevance, digital security, financial management, mental health support, and leadership coaching – so they can stay focused on their missions while building long-term resilience. Established actors provide stability and institutional leverage; frontline movements push boundaries, experiment, and hold systems accountable. Nicky’s work reflects a commitment to building feminist infrastructure through trust and proximity – meeting partners where they are, listening deeply, and recognising that creating space for collective reflection is as vital as funding itself.
“We encourage movements if they want to remain movements, to remain…without worrying about bank accounts and NGOs certificates.”
“We are excited to start hosting what we call imbizo gatherings,” Nicky explains, using the Zulu term for an open, participatory assembly. “We will bring together our partners – everyone from seed savers (farmers who collect, preserve, and exchange seeds for planting) to domestic workers, small women’s groups, larger organisations – and we just sit together. There’s no agenda other than to share, to listen, to learn from each other. It’s informal, but it’s powerful.”
Building ecosystems to end violence
Building ecosystems to end violence
Much of Nicky’s work is about building the systems and support structures that allow movements to endure. But systems also shape the conditions that enable violence to persist. At Ford’s Southern Africa office, this means using the Foundation’s unique vantage point to address gender-based violence not as isolated incidents but as symptoms of deeper interconnected systems of inequality.
“We look at our grant portfolios as an ecosystem. By cross-pollinating this work, we can bring organisations together to broaden and deepen what’s possible.”
“We look at our grant portfolios as an ecosystem,” Nicky tells me. “We might fund someone working with men and boys, support young girls’ activism, and partner with the President’s staff. By cross-pollinating this work, we can bring organisations together to broaden and deepen what’s possible.”
This convening power allows the office to create communities of practice around issues like community healing and gender-based violence, enabling organisations to co-learn, share research, and build collaborations that outlast individual grants. One such cluster focusses on work with men and boys and has resulted in partners really thinking together. “It’s the magic of being able to unlock these connections,” Nicky says. “It’s given me access to do the kind of things I only dreamed about.”
One of the tools guiding this work is the atmosphere of violence framework, a concept drawn from the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. Ford has adapted this lens to help partners examine how violence is embedded within the broader social conditions that surround it.
“Our prevention framework uses the ‘atmosphere of violence’ as a guide within which violence against women is located. This approach emphasizes that you can’t just address violence experienced by a victim, and then put them back into that atmosphere,” Nicky explains. “When we’ve presented this to partners, we’ve said, ‘You’re doing amazing work – what about this piece?’ And they’ve been unbelievably welcoming of this analysis. Many felt it was the missing piece,” she notes.
But building ecosystems for change also means confronting backlash. In South Africa, the rise in violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people is partly a symptom of deeper disempowerment among young men who feel excluded from post-apartheid progress, making them susceptible to narratives that threaten gender justice. “Men hold a lot of accountability for the burden of violence. It is also true to say these young men found themselves completely left out of a new South Africa. They saw that women had progressed beyond them,” Nicky says.
Many also face unaddressed mental health challenges, creating fertile ground for religious and ideological messaging that frames women’s empowerment as a threat to masculinity and the “African family”.
Nicky shares the stark realities behind these dynamics, recounting a recent femicide case where a woman was killed after meeting a man on Tinder, only to discover he was part of a group targeting and killing women. These insights emerged from Ford’s support to the Centre for Analytics and Behaviour Change, which tracks social media narratives to understand how backlash unfolds in real time. Her voice lowers as she describes the aftermath.
“The comments online were horrifying – people saying she deserved it,” Nicky says. “We’re battling this backlash in very particular ways.”
Inside systems, outside the box
Advancing agendas within political systems
Nicky and I turn to the unseen, often fraught work of advancing feminist agendas inside political systems – using institutional power while staying accountable to grassroots movements.
She tells me about Ford’s work with the South African President’s office, describing it as “remarkable”. Ford supported the President’s private office in strengthening the country’s gender-based violence commitments, funding provincial consultations and providing staff who kept the agenda alive during and after the pandemic. “We were in there, feet first,” Nicky says, noting that the investment - around USD$35 million over five years - was transformative within the South African context, supporting the development and implementation of the country’s first National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (NSP).
This groundwork helped lay the path for a landmark achievement: the adoption of the African Union Convention on Endling Violence Against Women and Girls. The language was hard-won, with negotiations on every clause, and compromises made on the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity due to entrenched homophobia across the region.
She emphasises that the Convention now makes it clear: civil society must be included in efforts going forward, ensuring that commitments reflect realities on the ground and that accountability is not left to governments alone. Staying at the table mattered, even when it was imperfect. “While there are still some issues to address,” Nicky acknowledges, “ what the Convention did was put women and girls at the centre of the conversation.”
The Convention also secured commitments to addressing masculinities and engaging men and boys in violence prevention. Heads of state launched a men’s champion group, meeting regularly to discuss these issues and their role in advancing change.
Ford’s approach also extends to practical, locally anchored methods, such as adapting the 100-Day Challenge methodology to address systemic barriers in South Africa. One such challenge reduced child maintenance case backlogs across six courts in a single province by 98% in 100 days, enabling women to feed their families and assert their independence. The strength of this method lies not only in outcomes but in building unexpected coalitions. Nicky shares the story of an electrician who, after installing streetlights as part of the project, realised that he had a role in ending gender-based violence by making it safer for women to walk home.
“South Africa. She’s complicated but she’s unbelievably beautiful.”
Anchored in the Ford Foundation’s 80 year legacy of aligning philanthropy with justice, Nicky’s work shows that feminist leadership is the craft of building models that can adapt to complexity while staying in solidarity with movements on the frontlines. It takes trust, agility, and a commitment to learning as you go. In a field where top-down approaches often ignore local realities, it is a powerful blueprint for holding purpose within imperfect systems while creating the conditions for change to take root.
As we close, Nicky pauses, reflecting on the contradictions and beauty of the place she has dedicated her life to serving.
“South Africa,” she says softly, “she’s complicated but she’s unbelievably beautiful.”