Erin Worsham, Executive Director of CASE
May 2026
The impact sector is navigating a moment of profound transition.
At the 2026 Skoll World Forum, Skoll Foundation CEO Marla Blow described the “unexpected depth and callous speed” of the cuts to development funding in 2025, comparing the disruption to a forest fire that devastated the community. But within that devastation, she argued, is an opportunity—not to restore the old impact ecosystem, but to regenerate and redesign it.
Across conversations with social entrepreneurs, funders, corporate leaders, technologists, and policymakers, four shifts stood out that may shape the future of impact leadership.
1. Scale will increasingly depend on rethinking who holds power
Scale continues to be top of mind in the impact sector, but there is a growing recognition that scale depends on investing in locally rooted organizations, institutions, and systems.
Wawira Njiru, founder of Food for Education (F4E), described her organization’s approach as “within the community, by the community, for the community.” F4E aims to feed at least 3M children daily by 2030, but recognizes that being grounded in local knowledge and local ownership of the solutions is the way to get there. Grace Matlhape, CEO of 2026 Skoll Awardee SmartStart, proclaimed that the answer to the early education learning access gap “was not a foreign strategy or even some technological innovation, the answer was local women” who could set the foundations for the 320K children that SmartStart has served.
Several speakers emphasized that achieving scale often requires partnership with others (as we have explained here), including national and local governments. F4E’s Njiru and comedian and philanthropist Trevor Noah offered a memorable analogy: social enterprises can move like jet skis—fast, nimble, able to test and adapt quickly. Governments, by contrast, move like tankers: slower to turn, but capable of creating much larger waves.
Underlying many of these conversations was a broader recognition that the geography of leadership and innovation is shifting. Africa was repeatedly framed not simply as a region in need of investment, but as a growing center of demographic (by 2030, 40% of the world’s young people will be African), entrepreneurial, and technological leadership driving local solutions.
2. The future of impact will require rethinking capital—not just raising more of it
Several speakers emphasized that unlocking capital for impact will require thinking differently about how capital is deployed over time. Conversations focused on capital stacks and blended finance: philanthropy taking early risks, funding innovation and early proof points, and helping de-risk models to the point where governments or commercial capital can eventually scale them.
Other conversations highlighted the increasing deployment of “Big Bets”: multi-million-dollar philanthropic investments such as Mackenzie Scott’s newsworthy giving of over $26 billion or those from the Audacious Project, Lever for Change, Co-Impact, and others. Yet there was also a recognition that these big bets are not enough: As one speaker said “the big bet ends, but the problem does not.” Funders are exploring extending support to provide longer-term capital, such as the Audacious Project’s Reinvestment pilot, and enterprise leaders are being thoughtful about what comes “After the Big Bet.”
Finally, more creative approaches to capital deployment were encouraged. Angela Gichaga, Founder & CEO enAble Advisors, shared examples ranging from creative debt approaches (such as debt-for-development swaps like the World Bank and IBRD supported swap in Côte d’Ivoire freeing up millions for reinvestment in education); unlocking pension funds (such as Impact Investing Ghana’s work to unlock pension funds for SMEs); and diaspora remittances (such as African Diaspora Network’s efforts to shift more of the $100B+ in annual remittances to Africa from household support to scalable business growth).
3. Systems change is ultimately about culture, trust, and narrative
Another theme across the Forum was that systems change is not driven by policy and innovation alone. It is also driven by culture and trust.
Alessandra Orofino, Founder of Peri Productions, argued that “culture is upstream from policy,” emphasizing that narratives, emotions, and collective identity often shape public behavior long before legislation does. She described deliberate efforts in Brazil to use storytelling, media, and digital culture to galvanize public commitment to protect the Amazon.
Former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos reflected on the importance of compassion in peacebuilding, while others like Dr. Francis Collins warned that many societies are currently experiencing a profound deficit of trust. Of note, the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 70% of respondents globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who has different values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural background than them.
For impact leaders, these conversations reinforced an important lesson: systems change is not only about designing better policies or scaling better interventions. It is also about shaping narratives and, especially in a time of accelerating AI, building trust, not just transactions.
4. AI is becoming strategy—not just technology
Of course, AI was a topic in many conversations across the Forum. But many of the most thoughtful conversations focused less on the technology itself and more on the organizational and ethical questions surrounding it.
Shannon Farley, Co-Founder & Executive Director of Fast Forward, argued that “for too long in the impact sector, technology has been thought of as IT instead of strategy. It has been overhead. Now we are seeing that tech is strategy and we need the funding to support it.” Organizations are now grappling not only with adopting AI tools, but with redesigning workflows, staffing models, and governance structures around them.
There was also caution against viewing AI as a silver bullet. Manu Chopra, co-founder and CEO of Karya, described AI as a potentially powerful tool for addressing information asymmetry—expanding access to information in local languages and underserved communities. But, he argued, information asymmetry is only part of the problem. Power asymmetry remains. Knowing about a government service does not necessarily mean someone can access it.
Speakers also raised concerns about exclusion, bias, and concentration of power within AI systems, many of which remain centered in high-income, English-language contexts.
The leaders who succeed in this next era will not simply adopt AI tools. They will know how to navigate the tensions between efficiency and ethics, scale and inclusion, automation and human judgment.
Looking Ahead
As Marla Blow suggested, the opportunity ahead is not simply to rebuild what existed before, but to regenerate and reshape the impact ecosystem itself.
And if we are to redesign the future of impact, it will require leaders who can rethink how power is shared, how capital flows, how trust is built, and how technology is deployed.