unDavos Summit

Building Ecosystems and Scaling Impact Initiatives | unDavos 2026


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Sun King went from scraping by for a decade to powering 50 million people with off-grid solar across 11 countries — backed by the largest local-currency securitization in Sub-Saharan African history. Rwanda scaled from 20 donor-funded clinics to over 350 self-sustaining, nurse-operated healthcare posts in under five years. This panel asks: how do you build the ecosystem that makes that kind of scale possible?─────────────────────────────WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS→ How Sun King built a financing ecosystem from social venture capital through to commercial securitization over 15 years to deliver 340,000 solar kits per month→ Why Doctors Without Borders took its Nobel Prize money to create a new drug development model that brought 20 molecules to market for six neglected diseases→ How the World Food Program’s blockchain identity platform saved $270 million in duplicate aid across 55 agencies in Ukraine→ Why the TransCap Initiative argues that capital orchestration — not just blended finance — is needed to transform entire agricultural systems→ The tension between investing in ecosystem building versus direct investment, and why philanthropy needs to be bolder─────────────────────────────PANELISTS🎙 Terence La — Head of Investments, Pensions for Purpose (Moderator)🎙 Patrick Walsh — Co-Founder & CEO, Sun King🎙 Stephen Cornish — General Director, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Geneva🎙 Bernhard Kowatsch — Director, Global Accelerator & Ventures, UN World Food Programme🎙 Dominic Hofstetter — Space Building Lead, TransCap Initiative🎙 Monica Sanders — Board Member, Society for Family Health Rwanda─────────────────────────────unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.🌐 undavos.com─────────────────────────────Tags: impact investing, ecosystem building, blended finance, off-grid solar, Sun King, MSF, World Food Programme, blockchain, capital orchestration, systemic investing, philanthropy, development finance, Africa, healthcare, energy access, social enterprise, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF---TRANSCRIPTSo, welcome to this session on building ecosystems for scaling impact initiatives. And what we're going to cover today is looking at why building ecosystem is as critical as initiatives, programs, ventures, innovations themselves. I'll start with an update. So, in my last 10 years of philanthropy and impact-investing experience, like many times I used to joke with my colleague that whenever the term ecosystem comes in, we're going to, in any conversation, we're going to have a shot. And it was more often than not, because suddenly in the last 10 years especially, it has become quite critical in the conversations, be it development finance, or even in the private sector approaches. So, we have quite a diverse set of panel here and we would love to get quite a bit of wide-ranging views on how do we go about building ecosystems. So, I'll start with a round of introductions for our panels and we'll then go into some of the key themes we're going to cover today. So, why don't I start with my right, Stephen, you want to go next? Hello. So, thrilled to be here. I'm Steve. I'm an innovator, environmentalist, and primarily a humanitarian. And I run the Geneva operational arm of Doctors Without Borders. So, hi everybody, Bernard. I'm with the World Food Program and I lead what's called the Global Accelerator and Ventures Team, based in Munich in Germany. But like, essentially, we work with communities across the globe. I'm Dominic. I lead an organization called the TransCap Initiative. We're a field builder for what we call systemic investing, which is an approach to capital deployment designed for transforming systems. My name is Monica Sanders. I am here representing Society for Family Health in Rwanda. I'm a board member there. In my day job, I work as a business strategist at the intersection of health equity, sustainability, and market developm
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unDavos SummitBy Mark Turrell