NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Reform, Transformation, and the Road Ahead

Something is shifting in the mainstream conversation about capitalism. After decades in which shareholder primacy was treated as economic law rather than ideological choice, a growing chorus of voices from within the financial establishment is acknowledging what impact entrepreneurs have long understood: the extractive model is failing on its own terms. Rising inequality, climate disruption, the hollowing out of community—these are not isolated policy challenges but interconnected symptoms of a system that externalizes costs and concentrates power. The question is no longer whether the current economic paradigm must change, but whether reform from within is sufficient—or whether genuine transformation requires the deeper structural reimagining that the regenerative economy represents.

In this Luminarias webinar and audience Q&A, Impact Entrepreneur’s Laurie Lane-Zucker welcomes award-winning journalist and author Elizabeth MacBride for a wide-ranging exploration of these questions. MacBride’s work—spanning Forbes, The Atlantic, CNBC, and BBC, and most recently the USA Today bestselling book Capital Evolution: The New American Economy (co-authored with venture capitalist Seth Levine)—has consistently investigated the gap between economic narratives and economic reality: the distance between what institutions say they value and what their structures actually produce. Her concept of “Dynamic Capitalism” offers a framework for understanding the emerging post-neoliberal landscape that is both intellectually serious and provocatively different from the regenerative vision our community is building.

The conversation will move across the most pressing questions facing the impact economy today: whether climate can be addressed in isolation or only as part of systemic transformation, how ownership structures must evolve to distribute rather than concentrate power, what distinguishes genuine accountability from sophisticated rebranding, and what it actually takes to move from extraction to regeneration. This is an opportunity for our global community of impact entrepreneurs, investors, and field-builders to engage with a sharp, well-informed voice from the mainstream economic reform conversation—and to test where the common ground lies and where the real disagreements begin.

Featured Guest

Elizabeth MacBride is a journalist, author, and entrepreneur whose reporting and commentary on finance, innovation, and global economic change have reached millions of readers worldwide. She is the co-author of three books, including the national bestseller Capital Evolution, which examines the future of capitalism and outlines principles for a more equitable, dynamic form of capitalism; The New Builders (Wiley, 2021), which helped reshape how policymakers understand entrepreneurship in America and informed $250 billion in U.S. pandemic-era aid; and The Little Book of Robo Investing (Wiley, 2024), on how technology is transforming personal finance. Her work has consistently championed people excluded from the global economy by structural barriers and social norms. As a reporter and editor, she has broken stories at the intersection of finance, technology, and policy for outlets including The New York Times, Quartz, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, and the BBC, reporting from places ranging from the Arkansas Delta and Silicon Valley to Kenya, Cambodia, the West Bank, and Gaza. More recently, she has focused on narrative change and information disorder and how they shape markets, democracy, and the future of work. A graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS, she is a single mother of two daughters and lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

In 2025, U.S. foreign assistance cuts under the Trump administration disrupted peacebuilding and stabilization efforts around the world, raising new questions about the future of the Global Fragility Act and broader U.S. engagement in fragile contexts.

To better understand the scale and consequences of these shifts, our team at The Aid Report has been tracking impacts across countries and sectors, drawing on verified data, on-the-ground reporting, and conversations with NGOs, practitioners, and former federal employees.

You’re invited to a discussion grounded in our latest findings. We’ll share a high-level overview, followed by a moderated conversation bringing together experts alongside journalists reporting on rights and stabilization from affected contexts.

We’ll explore emerging impacts across:

Implementation of the Global Fragility Act in priority countries
Community-level peacebuilding and conflict prevention
Secondary effects on social cohesion and local stability

Join us to compare notes and help inform where coverage, documentation, and analysis should go next.

How to watch
Online: Join the livestream via Zoom. A link to the livestream will be sent via email to all attendees.

On-Demand: Unable to join at the time of streaming? Register anyway. A link to the recording of this event will be sent to everyone who is registered for this event.

Live streaming time
Thu, 7 May 2026 | 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM EDT

This is a FREE members-only event. You can create a FREE ACCOUNT when registering for this event.

Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM EDT

Join 1000+ dynamic leaders from across 100 countries for the WILD Network’s online Leadership for Social Impact Forum.

Leaders in social impact face distinct challenges at every career stage: breaking through to senior roles, navigating complex organizational transformation, scaling impact with limited resources, and building the next generation of leaders.

In a time of rapid AI disruption, political uncertainty, and shifting funding landscapes, leading with intention requires fresh perspectives and trusted peers.

Connect with a truly global leadership community. Over 1,000 leaders from 200+ organizations across 100 countries will gather online, representing every career stage from emerging professionals to C-suite executives.

You’ll learn from diverse speakers and facilitators spanning the globe, each bringing expertise from the development, humanitarian aid, and social impact sectors as well as private sector companies.

Through interactive workshops, thought-provoking plenaries, and our MentorMatch platform, you’ll build relationships with peers who share your commitment to creating lasting change while navigating similar leadership challenges in their own contexts.

AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are becoming part of the professional landscape for evaluators and impact measurement practitioners. Much of the conversation about these tools has focused on efficiency and accuracy — whether AI can speed up data collection, automate reporting, or produce reliable analyses. These are important topics, but evaluators do not simply collect, analyze, and report information; their work requires thinking through ambiguity, talking through competing interpretations, and arriving at judgments that are unavoidably subjective. Questions of efficiency and accuracy, then, give us only a partial picture of AI’s implications for evaluation practice. We also need to ask what happens to evaluative reasoning itself when practitioners think through judgment calls with AI.

This webinar will present findings from a qualitative study of 13 impact investing evaluation professionals who incorporated ChatGPT into their work. The research examines what AI can and cannot bring to evaluative dialogue, finding that the very qualities that make AI useful for certain evaluative tasks limit its value for others.

Attendees will come away with a set of practical use cases for incorporating AI dialogue into evaluative work, along with a clearer sense of where AI-mediated reasoning adds value and where human dialogue remains irreplaceable for now. Questions and discussion of personal experiences will be welcomed during the session.

Africa Accelerated: Powering Africa’s engines of growth

Building on the momentum of previous successes, the third edition of the summit will centre around the theme “Africa Accelerated: Powering Africa’s engines of growth”. Taking place in May 2026, this year’s event will focus on harnessing the continent’s dynamic sectors and entrepreneurial spirit, providing a collaborative environment for delegates to explore innovative strategies, unlock opportunities, and drive impactful growth across Africa’s key industries. The summit will encourage active participation, ensuring that the voices of all stakeholders help shape the future agenda for sustainable economic advancement.

For inquiries, please contact privateenterprise@kpmg.co.ke. We look forward to seeing you there.

Professionals in impact measurement and management (IMM) come from a variety of professional backgrounds, some getting into IMM from a field-building or standard setting role, some from consulting, and others from Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL). A recent survey of IMM professionals within the impact investing industry provided evidence of these varying career paths – in fact, over 35% of respondents came to IMM with a background in MEL role. The survey also showed high levels of job satisfaction overall, but an eagerness for more growth opportunities, climate expertise, and data skills. In particular, those with a MEL background reported lower job satisfaction and weaker internal influence within their organizations.

Join this webinar featuring co-researchers Genevieve Edens, who got her IMM start at a social enterprise and a field-building organization, and Caitlin Rosser, who studied M&E in grad school and then got her IMM start through internal promotion, to unpack the data and offer insights into critical questions facing IMM professionals today. We will discuss MEL as an entry point into IMM, and how MEL skills and experience translate into an impact investing job. We will focus on what survey respondents said about career trajectory, technical expertise and data skills, and internal leadership.

The African Youth SDGs Summit is Africa’s largest youth forum on the Sustainable Development Goals. Launched in 2017, the Summit has evolved to bring together a multi-sector coalition of youth, development experts, government and UN entities, NGOs and the private sector to create the Africa we want together.

Once again, the African Youth Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Summit will be held both virtually and physically. We look forward to welcoming participants across Africa and around the world to connect and participate virtually, alongside a limited, in-person gathering of participants in Accra,Ghana.

Connect, network, and learn from a pan-African audience and contribute to an inspiring and constructive debate on the role of youth in the SDGs. Africa’s future is ours if we reach for it together. Are you in?