Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa

George Soros began his philanthropy in South Africa, giving scholarships to Black South African students in 1979. The Foundations’ work in Africa has expanded dramatically since then, and notably provided support to a range of civil society groups that helped drive a wave of democratic change starting in the 1990s. With the end of apartheid, we opened our national foundation in South Africa in 1993, followed by our first African regional foundation—the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa—in 1997. Our Open Society Initiative for West Africa, based in Dakar, followed in 2000. The Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa opened its doors in Nairobi in 2005, after Kenya held multiparty elections in 2002. In 2022, the separate regional foundations merged into a single regional entity: Open Society–Africa with offices in Dakar, Nairobi, and Johannesburg.