Wayfinding with Edelgive/SIX
EdelGive/SIX's live conversation with Michael Ngigi, Carla Duprat, Naghma Mulla and Sir Geoff Mulgan - ahead of Wayfinder Nairobi, 5–6 November 2026
Executive summary
Ten years after 160 people gathered in London and asked what social innovation should achieve by 2027, EdelGive/SIX opened the conversation up again - six weeks ahead of Wayfinder Nairobi. Four voices from four continents spent an hour testing the three questions that will drive the room in November: whether the field is ambitious enough, how it coordinates without recreating the extraction it claims to reject, and what social innovation actually looks like once the stable conditions it was designed for no longer hold.
What emerged wasn't consensus so much as a set of shared diagnoses arriving from very different directions: an obsession with metrics crowding out relevance, a widening gap between small-scale pilots and long-term pathways, and - cutting across every speaker - a sense that trust itself has become the scarce resource the field needs to rebuild first.
Key takeaways
Africa's social enterprise sector is forecast to roughly double by 2030 - from around $98 billion to $200 billion, per World Economic Forum figures cited on the panel - but visibility remains the bottleneck, not activity.
"Metric mania" is actively distorting the field. Funders' demand for scale, speed and countable outcomes is pulling ecosystems toward what's fundable rather than what's needed.
Social innovation is increasingly functioning as crisis management, not deliberate design - a symptom of an ecosystem too unsupported and too watched to make space for honest struggle, not just polished wins.
There's a widening gap between the micro and the macro. The world has 20–30 year pathways for net zero; it has nothing equivalent for welfare, education or democracy - leaving brilliant small pilots with nowhere to connect.
The imbalance in capital allocation is stark: roughly $1.5 trillion went into AI investment last year, against comparatively negligible serious investment in social problem-solving.
Higher education is a hugely underused asset - 50,000 universities, a trillion-dollar turnover, 260 million students globally - but most "challenge-based" university initiatives remain performative rather than seriously resourced.
Trust-building is learnable and small. Practices as simple as unstructured peer exchange across contexts were mentioned as a mechanism behind bigger shifts.
From the ground: Kenya's organic innovation economy
Michael Ngigi (ThinkPlace Africa, Nairobi) opened with what he called optimism, rooted in what's happening without formal financing or institutional backing - informal savings groups, community-led education initiatives, and ventures born directly out of broken institutions and eroded trust in leadership. He pointed to Hello Tractor, Nigeria's "Uber for tractors" connecting smallholder farmers with underused machinery, and HoneyCare, a Kenyan beekeeping venture solving market access, income generation and pollinator conservation at once.
His closing provocation summed up the gap he sees most clearly: a lot of social innovation is happening, but most of it stays invisible - and the field needs mechanisms to find it on the ground, rather than waiting for innovators to come looking for funding.
Rebuilding social imagination: leadership, trust and AI
Carla Duprat (ICE, São Paulo) located the work of rebuilding social imagination in leadership itself - specifically, leadership capable of orchestration across sectors rather than command within one. She described five years running ICE's Coalition for Impact, convening entrepreneurs, government, higher education and accelerators around shared problems, and named the through-line plainly: building trust across stakeholders takes real time, and there's no shortcut around it.
She also raised a question she would like answered: whether AI, as currently being built, is enhancing inclusivity or enhancing exclusivity - and who's actually deciding that.
On Brazil's fragmented social entrepreneurship field specifically, Carla pointed to a structural fix already underway: a requirement that 10% of university curricula be dedicated to outreach programmes, which ICE has mapped across 17 examples as a way of connecting entrepreneurs, public policy, accelerators and philanthropic risk capital that too rarely talk to each other.
The metric mania
Naghma Mulla (EdelGive Foundation, Mumbai) offered a sharp diagnosis. Funders' obsession with scale, speed and hard metrics - how many, how large, how fast - has crowded out the harder questions of relevance and permanence, and reshaped ecosystems to follow the money rather than the need.
Her striking claim: social innovation is increasingly operating as crisis management, not intentional design, because the ecosystem around it has become less supportive, not more. Convenings showcase wins; they rarely make room for struggle. She illustrated the alternative with a story from India - NGO leaders from Rajasthan's deserts and Ranchi's forested plateaus, brought together with no agenda beyond funded time to talk, discovering organically that one group could read early drought signals the other couldn't see. The intervention, she noted, was almost entirely just paying for people to be in the same room.
Her phrase for what funding practice is currently doing to the field: innovation needs oxygen, and the system is sucking it out.
The micro-macro gap
Sir Geoff Mulgan brought in his thoughts from seeing the patterns for the last two decades. Civil society and social innovation, he argued, will always be somewhat peripheral to power - cyclical in its access to governments and big philanthropy, never reliably backed, and requiring real resilience from anyone working in it.
His central provocation was about proportion: roughly $1.5 trillion flowed into AI investment last year alone, against what he called almost no serious investment in social problem-solving - an imbalance he said none of us could actually justify if pressed. He connected this to a second, longer-running gap: the field has no equivalent of the 20–30 year pathways that now exist for net zero - nothing comparable for welfare, education or democracy - leaving excellent small-scale pilots with no larger structure to plug into.
On AI specifically, he framed the choice starkly: an automation path that marginalises people, versus an empowerment path that strengthens the teacher, the doctor, the community worker - and warned that the field needs to get louder, not more cautious, in making the case for the latter.
Higher education's untapped power
Prompted by an audience question from Francois Strydom (University of the Free State), the panel turned to universities as a barely-used lever. Geoff cited a recent global survey of "challenge-based" university initiatives finding most of them, in his words, pretty superficial and pretty performative - chronically under-resourced next to teaching and research, despite universities collectively representing 50,000 institutions, a trillion-dollar turnover and 260 million students worldwide.
Michael offered a working counter-example from a five-year Ethiopia project, where embedding universities as research and prototyping partners from the outset meant the work continued, government-led, after the original team stepped back. Carla's Brazil data reinforced the opportunity: universities' convening power and institutional trust open doors nothing else can - when they stay connected to the communities they sit inside.
Closing provocations
Asked for one provocation each to carry into Nairobi:
Naghma: Patience and curiosity - a willingness to hear what we don't want to hear, because that's what should be fuelling solutions.
Geoff: Two ears, one mouth - planning to listen more than speak in November.
Michael: Build the mechanisms to find innovation where it's already happening, rather than waiting for it to come looking for funding.
Carla: Humility and joy.
