The Small Grants Programme across Africa
Applications received and grants awarded by country, 2009–2025 (32 funding rounds). Choose a measure, then hover or tap a country.
Across much of Africa, people living with cancer, HIV and other life-limiting illnesses still reach the end of life in pain that could have been eased — around 45% of African countries have little or no palliative care provision at all. The map below tells a more hopeful story: hundreds of grants reaching small hospices, hospitals and community groups in dozens of countries, each one bringing comfort and dignity to patients in their own homes. Every one of them was made possible by the generosity of the True Colours Trust.
The True Colours Trust
Since 2005, the True Colours Trust has stood beside us as a steadfast partner and friend. An independent funder working across the UK and Africa — established in 2002 by Lucy Sainsbury, and part of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts — True Colours makes grants designed to make a difference to the lives of disabled children and their families and to widen access to good palliative care. Its Africa Small Grants programme, which APCA is proud to administer on its behalf, supports the development of palliative care across the continent through modest, mostly one-off awards considered twice each year. The funding goes straight to what patients feel most directly: equipment and medicines, care for children and young people, capital improvements, training for local providers, and reaching people in rural areas far from any hospital. Year after year, True Colours has chosen to back exactly the kind of small, grassroots organisations that larger funders so often overlook. For that steady generosity, and for the trust it places in local providers, we are deeply grateful.
A future where everyone — wherever they live, whatever their age — can access good palliative care.