A year ago, those of us working in global development were still absorbing the shock. Official development assistance had contracted by roughly 23 percent — some $50 billion — driven by decisions in just a handful of donor capitals. The infrastructure that many community organizations had relied on, directly or indirectly, was simply gone. At Global Fund for Children, we felt it through our partners: grassroots organizations watching funding pipelines evaporate, navigating restrictive new registration laws, and absorbing rising need in their communities all at the same time.

Over the past several months, I’ve spent time in rooms where the future of this sector is being debated — at AfricaXChange in Nairobi, at the Global Philanthropy Forum, and at the Global Partnerships Conference in London. What strikes me most is how quickly the conversation has moved from grief to architecture. A new consensus is forming with remarkable speed: mobilize finance at scale, unlock trapped domestic capital — pension funds, local savings — deploy blended finance and outcomes-based instruments, and position philanthropy as the catalytic risk-taker that crowds in the trillions private markets could theoretically provide.

I find much of this genuinely energizing. The shift from tracking inputs to paying for outcomes is overdue, and the demand for demonstrable results is one civil society should welcome rather than resist. The Global Partnerships Compact launched in London even names the right destination: shifting resources, power, and decision-making closer to the people most affected, particularly women and girls.

But I’m carrying a worry out of those rooms, and it’s grown sharper with each convening.

In the rush to deploy catalytic capital at scale, civil society is being skipped over.

Listen closely to the new architecture conversations and you’ll notice who is largely absent from the design table: the community-based organizations that do the patient, unglamorous work of changing what’s possible in a place. When civil society appears at all, it’s often as an afterthought — a delivery channel, an accountability mechanism to bolt on later. Meanwhile, “local” is increasingly being defined as national governments and large NGOs, not the community organizations doing the deepest work.

The irony is that the finance-forward gatherings themselves keep surfacing the evidence for why this is a mistake. In Nairobi, the recurring insight was that Africa’s development challenge is increasingly not access to capital but the ability to translate financing into sustained implementation and delivery — and that the answer lies in locally rooted delivery ecosystems and scaling what already works, not launching endless new initiatives. In London, speakers were clear that development is unsustainable without trusted institutions, protected civic space, and a thriving independent civil society, and that the axis of accountability must flip from external donors back to citizens. I agree — and I’d go further.

Here’s the argument I keep making: community-based civil society isn’t downstream of large-scale investment. It’s the prerequisite for it.

Consider what actually determines whether a major education investment, a girls’ outcomes facility, or a climate resilience fund succeeds. Girls have to be able to stay in school — which means shifting norms around early marriage. Young people have to trust institutions enough to engage with them. Communities have to have the agency and organization to hold delivery systems accountable. Local knowledge has to shape design, or programs get quietly rejected by the people they’re meant to serve. None of this can be purchased at the point of investment. It’s built over years, by proximate organizations, through relationships. Skip it, and even the most elegantly structured capital will underperform. Fund it, and everything built on top works better.

This is where I can speak from evidence rather than conviction alone. Our recent impact study across 49 partners in 27 countries confirmed what we’ve long observed: small, flexible, trust-based grants to community organizations produce foundational outcomes at scale — girls staying in school, young people moving into livelihoods, communities shifting norms around violence and exclusion. Our partners are already generating the measurable results that outcomes-focused funders are now seeking. And they’re doing it while building exactly the social infrastructure — trust, agency, local leadership — that larger investments will depend on.

So Global Fund for Children isn’t waiting for the new architecture to be finished before finding our place in it. We’re capturing outcomes more consistently and rigorously, without abandoning the flexible, relational way we work. We’re focused on the “missing middle”: organizations that have outgrown seed grants but can’t yet meet the requirements of development finance institutions — scaffolding their growth rather than gap-filling around them. And we’re standing up, loudly, for the principle that community leadership belongs at the center of new financing models, not at their margins.

The reimagining of development is real, and it’s happening fast. My ask of fellow funders, DFIs, and governments designing the new instruments is simple: treat civil society as essential public infrastructure, and invest in it as such. The prerequisites for progress are being built right now, by community organizations working with less than ever. If we want catalytic capital to actually catalyze, we should start there.