Place-based synergies

Our integrated, place-based interventions unlock the true power of DGMT’s 10 opportunities to escape the inequality trap.

DGMT’s place-based synergies team brings these opportunities together in the lives of individuals in specific populations and communities. This approach follows the logic that “people don’t live their lives in health sectors or education sectors or infrastructure sectors, arranged in tidy compartments”. Instead, as Robert Zoellick, former President of the World Bank, explained in his address to world leaders: “People live in families and villages and communities and countries, where all the issues of everyday life merge. We need to connect the dots”.¹

The Lesedi Solar Power Park, November 2022. Photo courtesy of Michael Khan.

In South Africa, where you are born still shapes your chances in life — not because of your potential, but because of the neighbourhood you grow up in. That is the harsh legacy of spatial apartheid. Many communities remain locked in cycles of poverty, where even the most hardworking and talented children struggle to thrive.

To change this, we must change the systems within places — not only by building infrastructure or delivering programmes, but by shifting how people, programmes, and institutions in a community work together toward shared goals. This is the focus of our Place-Based Synergies work. We are not simply supporting the delivery of projects in specific communities; we are testing how to build the scaffolding — the invisible structures — that enable communities to unlock their own agency, strengthen local delivery systems, and align efforts across people, programmes, and institutions in service of better human development outcomes.

The neighbourhoods in which people grow up and live can determine their development pathways. We want to change these trajectories for the better.

We do this by playing five core roles:

Backbone Facilitation – Backbone facilitation is the work of holding the space for collective action — enabling people, programmes, and institutions to align around shared outcomes and move forward with focus, trust, and discipline.

Investment Stewardship – Investment stewardship is about strategically and responsibly directing resources toward programmes and partners that can shift key outcomes — and doing so in a way that is accountable, impact-driven, and aligned with the community’s broader development vision.

Accountability Infrastructure – Accountability infrastructure refers to the tools, processes, and spaces that support shared responsibility for results, enabling everyone in the ecosystem to see progress, track commitments, and course-correct together.

Community Narrative Building – Community narrative building is the intentional practice of shaping how a community sees itself — its challenges, its assets, and its possibilities. It’s about amplifying local voices, surfacing hope, and reinforcing the idea that meaningful change is both possible and already underway.

Capacity Strengthening – Capacity strengthening is the work of equipping local actors to lead, deliver, and sustain change — not by doing things for them, but by building their skills, knowledge, confidence, and systems, and generally strengthening their ability to deliver.

We do not implement programmes ourselves. Instead, we orchestrate and strengthen local ecosystems by working behind the scenes to ensure communities, partners, institutions, and data come together around a shared agenda in ways that drive real, measurable progress.

Our place-based synergies projects

Where we're working: Demonstration and Learning sites across South Africa

We are currently testing and refining our place-based strategy across a set of diverse communities — from rural towns to township clusters — where there is both long-term investment capital and the potential to build strong local ecosystems for change. These sites are not just implementation locations; they are living incubators of locally driven systems change, helping us to understand what it really takes to ensure every child, young person, and family thrives.

Some of these sites are anchored by well-established community development trusts, such as:

Lesedi Solar Park Trust (Northern Cape), working across Postmasburg, Danielskuil, Lime Acres, and surrounding rural villages.
Letsatsi Solar Park Trust (Free State), serving communities in and around Dealesville, Soutpan/Ikgomotseng, and Bloemfontein.

In these areas, long-term funding from renewable energy projects provides a rare opportunity to pursue deep, sustained, and systemic change.

We are also building momentum in other contexts beyond our primary demonstration sites, including KwaXimba in KwaZulu-Natal and Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape.

The five key strategic goals for place-based synergies

Cultivate community engagement and ownership

The sustainability of any intervention rests on local ownership and co-creation. People within the community are generally far more adept at articulating everyday barriers and enablers to maintain their own health, education, and experience accessing opportunities than technical experts who live outside the system. Without an appreciation of local perspectives, expert-driven interventions are far less effective.

Enable the implementation of integrated human development programmes

Most South Africans living in rural areas or ‘poor’ communities face a number of challenges through various stages of life. This reality results in a system where those who “make it” are the exception. To turn things around, we need holistic investment from preconception to employment with an aim to close opportunity gaps and open pathways to self-sufficiency.

Create opportunities for economic participation

There is a limit to the number of jobs that can be created within the current status quo. This is true for South Africa and is hardest felt by young people from townships and rural communities. If we do not contribute to job creation locally, our skills and human capital development investments will not go very far in enabling young people to truly be self-sufficient adults.

Foster safe and enabling environments

Societal issues like substance abuse and gender-based violence hinder our efforts to develop the potential of people in our communities. Similarly, when communities do not have access to basic services like clean water and good sanitation, both their health and their schooling outcomes are compromised.

Scale the impact of effective programmes and approaches

Funding from the REIPPP presents a wonderful opportunity to drive developmental change in some of South Africa’s poorest communities. In addition, many NGOs and philanthropic funders work tirelessly to help vulnerable communities to escape the poverty and inequality trap. As a stakeholder in this ecosystem and a strategic investor in evidence-based programmes, we want to engage with the broader ecosystem and find a way to make a unique contribution to it.

Escaping the inequality trap requires a twist in our thinking.

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