First, let me express my profound gratitude to the Ilo family for the singular honour of inviting me to deliver this inaugural memorial lecture in memory of their beloved father and patriarch, His Royal Highness Igwe Vincent Onyekelu Ilo, the Ohabuenyi of Adu Achi.
There is something deeply meaningful about memorialising those whose lives were lived not in pursuit of applause or acclaim, but in faithful service to others. It reminds us that true greatness is not measured solely by fame, wealth, or public recognition. There is a quiet nobility in a life defined by purpose, integrity, service, and contentment. HRH Igwe Vincent Onyekelu Ilo embodied that enduring virtue. He was a teacher who became a teacher of teachers; a headmaster, mentor, and community builder; and later, by the will and affection of his people, the traditional ruler of his community. He was a man who shaped lives, strengthened his community, and left behind a legacy of impact without noise – a powerful reminder that significance does not require spectacle.
I must also commend the Ilo family for choosing to honour their father not only by a memorial event, but by transforming the occasion into platform for social reflection and a national and continental conversation. In doing so, they have elevated this memorial to an act of public purpose.
So we gather not merely to remember a remarkable man, but to inaugurate a tradition – one that affirms the dignity of lives devoted to the service of others and the common good, while encouraging thoughtful public introspection on the challenges of development and human progress. This lecture pays homage not only to the legacy of HRH Vincent Onyekelu Ilo, but also to the values that defined his life: service, community, compassion, charity and philanthropy. It is therefore fitting that the theme of this lecture speaks directly to those values: “Charity as a Catalyst for Social Change: Moving from Philanthropy to Sustainable Social Impact.”
Before we go too far, let me attempt to explain some of the terms or words in our rather long topic. What is charity? Charity is the provision of immediate help or relief. It responds to urgent human needs such as hunger, poverty, illness, disasters, homelessness, or hardship. Charity addresses the symptoms of social problems. So the central question that charity would ask if it were a human would be: “How do we help people who are suffering right now?”
Charity is very important because human suffering cannot wait for long-term solutions. What then is Philanthropy? Philanthropy, is generally about giving towards long-term systemic change. It seeks to address the root causes of problems rather than only the immediate effects. Philanthropy often involves strategic investments in institutions, education, innovation, research, policy, entrepreneurship, and community development.
For example: funding education by building schools and giving scholarships, investing in affordable housing initiatives, supporting healthcare research, creating job-training programmes, financing social enterprises, advocating for policy reform. Philanthropy asks the question: “Why does this problem exist, and how can we reduce or eliminate it permanently?” So a simple way to understand the difference between charity and philanthropy is with this common illustration: charity gives a hungry person a meal, philanthropy creates systems so fewer people will go hungry in the future. Charity offers a short term palliative, philanthropy seeks to give a longterm solution.
Throughout history, charity has been one of humanity’s noblest instincts. Across cultures, faiths, and civilisations, people have always reached out to lift others from suffering. Charity is when on your birthday you go to an orphanage and give food and gifts, or at Christmas you feed. A poor community in your neighbourhood or the church does a medical outreach at Easter for those who cannot afford medical care. It is charity that rushes toward disaster before governments arrive. It is charity that comforts the orphan, supports the widow, and extends compassion where systems have failed.
It is charity that reminds us that the human spirit is at its best when it chooses generosity over indifference. And yet, while charity relieves pain, we must ask, can charity alone transform society? Can we continue to merely respond to poverty without confronting the structures that create it? Can we celebrate giving without questioning why so many remain perpetually dependent on receiving? Can we truly call our acts of charity successful if communities remain vulnerable generation after generation? These may be uncomfortable questions, but they are necessary especially in our society where charity is an obligation, an injunction, in practically all the religions we practice.
For Christians, Christ himself in Matthew 25:36-40: said that those who give the hungry food, and the thirsty drink, those who give shelter to strangers and clothe the naked, visit the sick and the imprisoned are actually doing those things for Him. Whatever charitable acts you do to the poorest or the most vulnerable, you do it for Jesus. Now this is a powerful, incentive to be charitable especially as Jesus concluded by saying those who do so will inherit eternal life and those who do not will go to hell. For Islam, giving to the poor or almsgiving, Zakat, is one of the five foundational pillars of Islam. The Quran says in Surah 2:177: “Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward east or west, but righteousness is… to give wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy…” One hadith says: “He is not a believer whose stomach is filled while the neighbor to his side goes hungry.”
There is a profound moral paradox at the heart of religious charity: a society can become highly charitable without becoming substantially more just. Almsgiving relieves suffering, but it can also relieve conscience. Once generosity becomes ritualised – a duty that is discharged at predictable intervals – it may soothe conscience of the giver more effectively than it transforms the condition of the poor. The hungry are fed, but the structures that manufacture hunger remain untouched. In this way, charity can unintentionally coexist with, and sometimes stabilise, inequality. The paradox is especially striking in deeply religious societies such as ours. The more visible the acts of mercy, the easier it becomes to believe that the moral obligation has been fulfilled. A wealthy person may sincerely feel righteous after giving a portion of his income to the poor while remaining economically, politically, or socially invested in arrangements that perpetuate deprivation. The donation becomes a kind of moral settlement: compassion paid in instalments.
This does not make charity insincere. Often it is profoundly sincere. But sincerity alone does not alter systems. Religious traditions frequently elevate generosity because it humanises wealth and restrains selfishness. Yet generosity can remain fundamentally vertical: the powerful giving downward to the powerless. The relationship itself remainsintact. The poor survive, but they do not necessarily gain agency, ownership, education, political voice, or access to the structures that create prosperity. Charity can keep people alive without enabling them to stop being poor. Reforming corrupt institutions, challenging exploitative labor systems, redesigning land ownership, improving
education, or dismantling monopolies is slower, conflict-ridden, and morally ambiguous.
Charity comforts; justice disrupts.
This is why poverty can deepen even in cultures saturated with benevolence. The energy of moral concern flows toward relief rather than transformation. The poor become permanent recipients instead of equal participants in economic life. Entire societies can normalise the existence of poverty so long as mechanisms exist to soften its sharpest edges. In some cases, charity can even become unconsciously protective of hierarchy. The benefactor derives moral identity from giving; the existence of need sustains the role of the benefactor. The relationship risks becoming cyclical: poverty generates charity, and charity helps society tolerate poverty.
The deeper ethical question, then, is whether the highest moral calling is generosity or justice. Generosity asks: How much should I give? Justice asks: Why are people deprived in the first place? Generosity can coexist with inequality; justice interrogates its foundations. The greatest spiritual traditions occasionally hint at this distinction. The prophets did not merely ask rulers and merchants to be kinder; they condemned fraudulent scales, exploitation, hoarding, corruption, and systems that “devoured the wealth” of the vulnerable. Their critique was not only personal but structural. Mercy was never meant to substitute for justice. A mature moral society therefore cannot stop at almsgiving. Charity is necessary because suffering is immediate. But if charity becomes the endpoint rather than the beginning, it risks functioning as a tranquiliser for the conscience. The ultimate measure of compassion is not how efficiently a society distributes alms, but whether it steadily reduces the number of people who need them at all.
So I think people of faith must bear in mind that the spiritual injunctions on giving to the poor implicitly expect adherents to seek ways of ending poverty as acts of compassion and not to increase dependency of the poor in order to please God by giving! If your charity graduates to philanthropy such that the poor no longer need your alms that must please God even more.
So the world today does not simply need more charity. It needs more transformation.We are living in an era of widening inequality. Millions still lack access to quality education, healthcare, affordable housing, clean water, and economic opportunity. Climate change disproportionately affects the poorest communities. Youth unemployment threatens social stability. Entire populations remain excluded from systems of prosperity. In this reality, philanthropy must evolve.
The future of social impact lies not only in helping people survive hardship, but in empowering them to overcome it permanently. This is the shift we must embrace: from transactional giving to transformational investment; from temporary relief to long-term resilience; from dependency to empowerment; from charity as sympathy to charity as strategy.
Sustainable social impact begins when we stop asking merely, “How much did we give?” and start asking, “What systems did we change?” A bag of food may feed a family for a week, but access to education, skills, financing, and opportunity can transform generations. Building a shelter may save lives today, but building affordable, inclusive, and sustainable communities creates stability for decades. Donating to schools is commendable, but reforming education systems, investing in teachers, digital access, and innovation creates lasting national development. This is the difference between relief and renewal. Good philanthropy in the 21st century must become catalytic. It must ignite possibilities. To be sustainable, it must strengthen systems rather than seek to replace them. It must create ecosystems of people to become architects of their own future.
Let me give two examples, the first a relatively small intervention. In 2016, I visited the IDP camps in Borno State as Vice President, and there were thousands of children orphaned by the Boko Haram insurgency. Charitable contributions had set up the camps, feeding and care for them was also largely from government emergency relief services. But we decided to establish a private philanthropic initiative, the North East Children’s Fund. Its objective was to build world-class schools for children orphaned by the insurgency. The current Vice President, then Governor HE Kashim Shettima gave me a good piece of land to build the school. The school was named the Learning Centre. Our first intake of 500 kids, boys and girls, could not speak Hausa let alone English, only Kanuri. We got the best teachers and partnered with Grange school in Lagos.
Five years later in 2021 at the fifth year anniversary of the school, the kids were showing off their coding, music and debating skills. Today over 300 are in secondaryschools. Charity was able to go as far as the IDP camps but to transform the destinies of the children, philanthropy had to come in. Ford Foundation transformed modern philanthropy by funding long-term social justice and civil rights efforts rather than only providing charity. Between 1950 and the 1970s in the US, it supported civil rights organisations, public-interest law, community development, education, and policy reform, helping challenge systemic inequality and discrimination. Its investments strengthened institutions that expanded access to justice, housing, and economic opportunity for marginalised communities. The Foundation’s most transformative contribution was shifting philanthropy from temporary relief toward changing systems, institutions, and power structures – a model that has since influenced philanthropic and development work around the world.
How about the impact the Gates Foundation has made on healthcare in Africa? Over the past two decades, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has become one of the most influential actors in African public health, spending tens of billions of dollars globally on vaccines, malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and disease eradication, with Africa as its primary focus. Its support for the founding and activities of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance is one of the best examples of the catalytic role of philanthropy. The Gavi Vaccine Alliance was never simply about giving money. It was about redesigning how vaccines were financed, priced, and delivered across the continent. Before Gavi, African countries purchased vaccines individually, facing high and inconsistent prices. With strong backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gavi pooled demand across dozens of countries and negotiated collectively with manufacturers. Vaccine prices dropped dramatically – sometimes by more than 90 per cent – making life-saving vaccines affordable at scale.
Equally transformative was the creation of long-term, predictable financing through multi-year commitments and innovative mechanisms such as the International Finance Facility for Immunisation and Advance Market Commitments. These turned future donor pledges into immediate, deployable capital and gave manufacturers confidence to scale production. But Gavi did more than fund vaccines. It invested in cold-chain infrastructure, logistics systems, and healthcare worker training – because vaccines only save lives if they reach people. The result: Gates-backed vaccination campaigns helped drive a dramatic fall in child mortality and contributed to an estimated 90 per cent of decline in measles deaths in Africa since 2000. GAVI-supported immunisation efforts linked to Gates funding are estimated to have saved nearly 19 million lives since 2000, while broader global vaccination programs have saved over 100 million infants over the past fifty years. Hundreds of millions of children vaccinated, major reductions in child mortality, and stronger health systems across Africa. Gavi did not just finance vaccines – it engineered a market. And that is what catalytic capital looks like.
To ensure that philanthropy works to transform systems and not create an addiction, a new mindset is required. Philanthropy must be aimed at strengthening public systems not replacing them. Philanthropy cannot last forever so it must not pretend that it can. For the same reason, governments must not depend on philanthropy to run systems. The Gates story exposes the deep structural problems that are caused by dependency, namely the chronic weakness of sovereign healthcare financing in Africa. Most African countries still spend well below the Abuja declaration target of allocating 15 per cent of national budgets to healthcare, leaving many systems dependent on donors for vaccines, infectious disease programs and even basic public health functions.
As a result, Africa has become better at combating specific diseases while many national healthcare systems remain fragile. Vaccination coverage improved, HIV deaths declined, and malaria prevention expanded, but many countries still lack resilient primary care systems, adequate hospitals, sanitation infrastructure, and sufficient healthcare workers. The Gates Foundation therefore represents both a humanitarian triumph and a reminder that philanthropy, however effective, cannot substitute for strong, government agency in the provision of social services.
Second, philanthropy must be collaborative. Collaboration is essential. No single government, corporation, foundation, or NGO can solve today’s complex social challenges alone. Real change happens when public institutions, private enterprise, civil society, faith organisations, and local communities work together with shared purpose. The catalytic role of philanthropy then becomes clearer. They are to resource and collaborate in making them work.
To conclude, charity or generosity is important, but it must not stop there. Charitable givers must also see the need to understand their role in the value chain of transformation. There are those who can only give very small amounts to deal with immediate crisis, but there are those with the resources to give immediately and long term. Individuals and organisations with substantial resources should not give alms alone, they have the resources to prevent the need for almsgiving. They have theresources to build systems that unlock opportunity. We need philanthropy that supports innovation, entrepreneurship, education, healthcare, sustainable housing, and inclusive economic growth. We need investments that create jobs, strengthen institutions, empower women and youth, and prepare future generations for a rapidly changing world.
Perhaps it is time for us all – leaders, institutions, businesses, and citizens – to rethink what it means to give. Let us move beyond charity that only alleviates suffering. Let us build systems that eliminate the causes of suffering. Let us move from occasional acts of kindness to enduring structures of opportunity. Let us create impact that outlives us.
Several major philanthropies began before their founders became wealthy. Chuck Feeney built The Atlantic Philanthropies from a philosophy of modest living and giving. Muhammad Yunus started microloans with just $27, leading to Grameen Bank. George Soros supported scholarships and dissidents before his financial success created Open Society Foundations. Andrew Carnegie and Madam CJ Walker rose from poverty yet gave early to education and social causes. Their stories show that enduring philanthropy often begins with vision, not wealth. And that is how charity becomes not just an act of compassion, but a catalyst for lasting social change.
Once again let me congratulate the Ilo family on this special remembrance for their great father HRH Vincent Ilo, fondly called Vuse, the Elie Avo, the first Ohabuenyi of Etiti and Adu Achi, the Agaa na Mba and the Onyekeluonweya. May his memory and legacies always be blessed.
Yemi Osinbajo, a professor of Law and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), is a former vice president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
This is the text of a Keynote Address delivered at the Inaugural Memorial Lecture for HRH Igwe Vincent Onyekelu Ilo on Tuesday, 19th May, in Enugu, Nigeria.
