Founded in 1992 as Salama SHIELD Foundation by Dennis Willms, we began with community health and micro-finance work in Uganda and Malawi. Three decades of fieldwork sharpened that into a clear specialization, and a new name:

MBUNTU Foundation.

Mbuntu Foundation is not a general development charity running a list of separate programmes. We do one thing, and we do it deeply: we study, strengthen, and scale the financial systems communities already build for themselves. This involves savings groups, credit circles and cooperatives, and use what we learn to design better programmes and inform wider policy.

Our board brings together diplomats, education and public policy specialists, financial inclusion researchers, filmmakers, former professors, lawyers, and former Salama SHIELD (Mbuntu) Foundation staff. It is a deliberate mix, built for a sector facing real funding pressure and an increasing pull toward tech-led, scale-first approaches to development. We are investing in the opposite: humanistic, high-touch fieldwork, backed by people who have lived the practice.