Our Biggest Challenge Isn’t Capital. It’s Systems.
Reflections from The Skoll World Forum in Oxford, April 2026.
Oxford has a way of slowing you down just enough to notice things you’d otherwise miss. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the place, the narrow streets, and the quiet weight of history. Or maybe it’s what happens when a few hundred of the world’s most committed social impact leaders spend a week in the same rooms, refusing to let each other settle for easy answers.
This was my first year at the @SkollWorldForum, and, upon reflection, a key pattern accumulated slowly across panels, coffee conversations, and hallway exchanges until it became impossible to set aside: the sector’s most pressing constraint is not the availability of resources. It is the design of the systems through which those resources flow.
The Question That Started It
It began with a question, posed by Tulaine Montgomery of NewProfit:
“How can you deal with situations where the elements of your life, culture, or community are defined by those who have the funds to help you as ‘risk’?”
That question rewards slow reading. Risk, in the way Montgomery frames it, is not an objective measurement. It is an attribution, and attributions are made by people with the standing to make them. When communities most in need of investment are routinely categorized as too risky to fund, the categorization says less about those communities than it does about who holds the definitional authority and how that authority has been designed.
A separate consensus was forming across sessions on catalytic capital, blended finance, and cross-sector collaboration, and was well articulated by X100’s CEO, Kieron Boyle, who stated:
“There’s no shortage of capital. It’s all there. It’s more about figuring out where it is and better coordinating the flow across philanthropic, government, and private funding.”
This is becoming the sector’s working assumption, which makes the persistence of slow, uneven progress harder to explain away and more important to understand precisely.
The Measurement Gap At The Center of Everything
Follow the question of why outcomes lag behind investment, and the answer tends to converge on the same place: the sector has developed far more sophistication around deploying capital than around understanding what it produces.
Funding is treated as a proxy for change. Programs launched stand in for the success achieved. These substitutions are understandable. Inputs and outputs are measurable, schedulable, and reportable. Impact lives in a different register entirely: longitudinal, contextual, resistant to clean quarterly narratives. Real-world social change happens at the intersection of impact, progress, and efficiency, a space that is genuinely complicated and genuinely uncomfortable, which is part of why so much energy gets spent at the edges rather than the center.
This notion came up again and again in conversations with sector experts and thought leaders like Jim Fruchternman, Dan Viederman, and Johana Cordovez, all of whom pointed out that data, technology, and analytical infrastructure are not support functions for social impact. They are a form of capital in their own right, with the same claim on investment as programs and personnel. When the sector underfunds them, it structurally limits its ability to know whether what it is doing is working.
Organizations across the sector invest heavily in program design and execution, and far less in the measurement architecture that would tell them whether their design assumptions are holding. The result is a kind of institutional blindness that compounds over time.
Time is a Design Variable
Much of the Forum’s conversation about incentives, sooner or later, led back to time.
Philanthropic risk, as one participant observed, is a derivative of time horizon. Expand the horizon, and the nature of risk changes. This was emphasized by Kristen Molyneaoux from Levers for Change in our conversation, where she asserted that assets that look volatile in the short run become stable; systemic threats that are invisible in a single fiscal year become the central variable. Pension funds are instructive here: their obligations extend across decades, so they must account for climate exposure, demographic change, and economic cycles as core inputs, not edge cases. Twelve-month funding cycles applied to multi-year social problems produce the opposite logic, training organizations to optimize for what can be demonstrated annually rather than for what the problem actually requires.
When the measurement cadence has no relationship to the pace of the change being pursued, evaluation stops being a tool for learning and becomes a performance for funders.
Expanding the Definition of Capital
A related pattern: the sector’s definition of capital has not kept pace with its understanding of what drives outcomes.
Investment conversations in philanthropy default to financial capital, understandably, since money is the most visible and transferable resource. What rarely enters the investment calculus with the same rigor is everything that determines whether financial capital converts into impact: data infrastructure, analytical capacity, organizational knowledge, skilled talent, technology systems, and the institutional processes that connect them. These are not peripheral. They are the mechanism. When they are underfunded or absent, financial investment flows into programs that cannot fully account for their own results.
In his new book, “Technology for Good: How Nonprofit Leaders Are Using Software and Data to Solve Our Most Pressing Social Problems”, Jim Fruchterman documents this systematically. Across more than sixty nonprofits on six continents, the organizations that achieve impact at scale treat technology and data as core infrastructure, funded deliberately, maintained continuously, and integrated into program design from the outset. The organizations that treat tech as an afterthought tend to find that their impact is similarly difficult to locate. These components of technology, data, measurement, skills, and organizational maturity, when enabled through investment, are just as important as the funding itself.
The Game Theory of Good Intentions
This is where the analysis becomes most uncomfortable, because it implicates the entire ecosystem.
Sustaining meaningful social impact requires four distinct roles: those who fund, those who build, those who execute in communities, and those who measure. The roles can overlap, but the presence of all four, and more critically, their alignment, cannot be substituted for.
Let’s assume for a second that each actor in this system is rational, responding to real incentives. Funders manage risk, protect reputation, and demonstrate responsible capital deployment. Builders focus on execution and organizational continuity. Communities work to preserve trust and secure outcomes for the people they serve. Evaluators pursue rigor and accountability. These are legitimate orientations. The difficulty, as highlighted by @Noubar Afeyan in his keynote conversation with @TrevorNoah, is that they point toward different objectives on different timescales, and a system of rational actors pursuing locally optimal strategies does not automatically produce collective outcomes. It produces equilibrium, which is not the same thing.
When funders reward short-term demonstration, builders prioritize what can be delivered and reported on schedule. Measurement adapts to what is legible to funders rather than what is useful to practitioners. Communities recalibrate expectations accordingly. Incentive design is, in this sense, as important as program design. The question of who benefits when the system works, and who absorbs the cost when it does not, determines far more about outcomes than the quality of any individual initiative.
Carrying Complexity Without (Immediate) Resolution
One of the more striking themes at the Forum was how often the most effective practitioners described their work in terms of productive tension rather than achieved clarity. As @Nicola Galombik of Yellowwoods Holdings observed, success lies in the capacity to carry competing demands simultaneously, remaining patient in strategy while staying agile in tactics, operating at the level of systems while maintaining accountability to individual lives. The ecosystem needs both kinds of actors: those with the scale to shift structural conditions, and those with the depth to reach the people and places that broader systems routinely fail to serve. Neither renders the other redundant.
What This Requires
The implications are structural, and they are specific. Measuring what changes in people’s lives requires building measurement infrastructure with the same intentionality applied to program infrastructure. Aligning accountability frameworks with the actual pace of social change requires renegotiating what funders ask for and when. Treating data capacity, analytical talent, and technology systems as primary investments requires including them in budget decisions from the beginning. Designing for ecosystem health requires funders, builders, communities, and evaluators to share both the rewards of success and the consequences of failure.
At Sowen, this is the terrain we inhabit: where strategy meets implementation, where organizations must make consequential decisions with imperfect data, and where measurement has to do more than document what happened. It has to inform what happens next. The distance between those two things is where impact lives, and the sector’s next phase will be defined by who builds systems capable of closing it.
Looking Ahead
What I will be watching for, between now and the next time these conversations reconvene, is evidence of a shift from diagnosis to design, from consensus on the problem to accountability for the response. The question worth asking at next year’s Forum is not what we discussed, but what changed.
