About Us
About Us
PANAFAID is the first PanAfrican humanitarian aid agency to adopt a global remit. That is not to say it is the first thing Africa and the Diaspora have given the world - Africa’s peacekeeping forces are the essence of her humanitarianism, not to mention her human and material sacrifices in the two World Wars and Korea. PANAFAID is Africa’s way of extending this giving tradition to all communities of the world, including the traditional donor countries. This is because we recognise that every nation, rich or poor, has problems that her friends can help solve. PANAFAID aims to carry out this audacious mission with characteristic African flair, courage, tenacity and compassion.
PANAFAID (Pan-African Aid) was founded in 2017 by Ishmael Fiifi Annobil, the london-based Ghanaian poet, journalist, and filmmaker. He was inspired by the ever-increasing vulnerability of Africans globally, including the killing of African students in India, the brutalising of Sub-Saharan migrants in Libya, and the exodus of African youth from their mother continent due to economic pressures.
Another motivating factor was Africa’s unique absence from international relief work in a donor capacity, despite the generous aid it receives from developed and other developing countries as poor as Cuba. To Annobil, disasters like the Haiti’s earthquake and Japan Tsunami, Hurricane Katarina, and the 2017 Atlantic Hurricanes symbolised Africa’s ineffectiveness in the Global community: “The fact that Africa had nothing to offer anyone, during those trying times, was an historic tragedy in itself.”
Despite that, Annobil views PANAFAID as a crystalisation and invocation of Africa’s long history of giving to the world in other spheres, such as the peerless peacekeeping and sacrifices of African soldiers around the world (such as the fabulous valour of Ghanaian troops during the Rwanda Genocide); the diplomatic leadership in the UN; the inventiveness, and the modernising influences Africa has had and continues to have on the world, through her pioneering scientists, medical innovators, inventors, art and musical genius, exceptional sportmanship, minerals resource, and food.
Crucially, PANAFAID represents Annobil’s vision of “a PanAfrican culture that gives back to the world, and shifts it’s ‘donee’ image in the process”. He credits his 34 years in Europe for this thinking, because it gave him a sobering insight into First World poverty and anguish, prejudice, homelessness, unemployment, post-industrial neglect, mental health issues, drug abuse, and the plight of Asylum Seekers and Refugees. In essence, everybody needs help sometime.