This column is part of a partnership with Global Fund For Children.
Over the next few years, a wave of tens of billions of dollars from AI may flow into philanthropy, more than the sector has ever had to absorb at once. Nan Ransohoff's essay this summer, The Third Wave of American Philanthropy, asked the question everyone in the field is now arguing about: Who will move that money fast enough to matter? Ransohoff’s essay has sparked frantic debate among philanthropy leaders across the United States and Europe.
In the Global South, we should be paying attention too.
Ransohoff's proposed fix is a "Silicon Valley for public goods," thousands of new "philanthropic startups" and "philanthropic VCs," built from scratch to deploy this money at speed. Her urgency is welcome. But the premise underneath it is a familiar and dangerous one that the infrastructure needed to confront the polycrisis doesn't yet exist, and has to be invented.
Two responses to her essay stand out to me. The first is by John Fullerton, an American economist and a leader in regenerative economics, in a piece called Avoiding a 3rd Wave of (Ignorant) Philanthropy. Fullerton argues that the problem isn't an empty field waiting for clever technologists to build on. The world is already full of institutions, networks, movements and leaders doing this work. What they lack isn't talent. It's trust and capital. I agree.
The other piece, The Economist’s Silicon Valley’s AI boom is remaking American charity, echoes Fullerton's read on the ideology behind Silicon Valley giving: "Their focus on giving money to projects where they can measure results leads them to overlook causes like women’s empowerment or cultural heritage protection." But what gets overlooked isn't necessarily what produces less impact, it's what resists translation into the metrics, timelines and categories that distant donors prefer. Territorial governance, women's leadership, cultural continuity, and community power aren't peripheral to climate action. They're part of the infrastructure through which ecosystems get protected.
The infrastructure already exists
From where I stand in the Global South, if this new wave of philanthropy simply capitalizes bigger institutions in the Global North — whether old ones or newly minted "startups" — it will reproduce the very architecture that has already failed to reach the people protecting forests, defending territories, sustaining democratic life, and responding to crises every day.
The real question isn't whether we can build enough Global North organizations to absorb the money. It's whether wealth holders will recognize and resource the infrastructure the Global South has already built to protect the future of life itself.
The Global South should be at the full center of attention right now, as far as protecting life on this planet, and therefore the future of humanity, is concerned. Much of what gets called "the polycrisis" is happening here. And this is not an empty field waiting for new institutions to arrive. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East, thousands of institutions already move resources, solve problems, and reach communities that large international funders struggle to reach. Some are foundations. Others are feminist or Indigenous funds, scientific institutions, social movements, or networks built for a particular place and purpose. Some of these networks date to the 1970s. They include organizations that resemble conventional US and European foundations, others that directly broke from those structures to build something new (like my organization the Casa Fund, described in detail in this article), and still others that are more informal and fluid, shaped to the moment and the community they serve.
I recently wrote about NEAR's map of 63 locally-led pooled funds across the Global South, and noted that even that list undercounts the field. It doesn't yet include, for instance, Prospera's 47 women's and feminist funds, which together make more than 2,800 grants a year across 172 countries. Nor does it include The Global South House, which connects networks and community funds in over 50 countries. The Human Rights Funders Network's Trust Gap report catalogs the philanthropic structures tackling major human rights issues across the Global South and East — structures that remain significantly underfunded relative to their Global North counterparts — and singles out local activist funds as a major force in addressing some of the hardest problems in these regions.
These groups may not resemble the organizations that dominate American philanthropy, but they've achieved a scale of reach, relationship and territorial presence that Northern philanthropy would find extraordinarily hard to replicate. Many have survived political instability, currency crises, shrinking civic space, disasters and abrupt shifts in donor priorities. They operate across languages and currencies, effectively rebuilding marginalized societies in the process. In short, they've built the relationships, judgment, financial controls and accountability systems required to move resources responsibly in difficult contexts.
What they haven't received is capital proportionate to that capacity, or to the scale of the challenges they confront. And to be clear, funders don't have to go find them on their own. The networks and alliances mentioned above are already there, identifiable with minimal effort.
A failure of perception
The so-called "absorptive-capacity gap" that Ransohoff takes as a given is really a failure of perception. This infrastructure is invisible to anyone whose map only includes organizations that look familiar to Northern donors: large balance sheets, English-language communications, internationally recognized boards, expensive offices, program teams organized around categories invented elsewhere.
If a funder can't see what already exists, the answer isn't to build a parallel system. The first obligation is to question the map.
And it isn't only Global North donors missing this infrastructure. Newly wealthy people within the Global South are missing this map and this history too, which puts them at risk of what Fullerton calls "ignorant philanthropy." The rise of new wealth isn't only a Silicon Valley story — fortunes are expanding across the Global South as well, from technology and finance to agribusiness, mining, energy, real estate and inherited family capital. The origins differ, but the philanthropic choice is the same everywhere: will wealth holders use giving to extend their own authority, or allow resources to strengthen independent social power?
Fullerton warns that absorbing this new wealth into new Global North structures almost guarantees importing a mechanistic, venture-capital worldview into a living world. His critique goes beyond whether enough institutions exist to absorb new money — it asks whether the worldview that produced extreme concentration can repair a polycrisis rooted in extraction and separation.
Capital can move quickly and still move in the wrong direction. It can fund scale while destroying proximity. It can accelerate a donor's preferred solution while bypassing the people who understand the problem as lived reality. A new wave of Global South wealth risks bringing its own set of ideologically encumbered "new" ideas, to which civil-society organizations will again be expected to conform — this time perhaps not in the language of traditional foundation jargon, but in the vocabulary of venture capital, exponential growth, optimization and technological solutionism. The packaging changes. The hierarchy doesn't.
Recognition before invention
Ransohoff is right about the scale of the opportunity. Fullerton is right that a venture-capital worldview cannot repair a living world by treating it as a machine. And The Economist is right that what gets overlooked isn't necessarily what produces less impact, but what resists translation into metrics.
Together, these arguments point to a different conclusion: the next wave of philanthropy must not begin with invention. It must begin with recognition and redistribution. Yes — build where genuine gaps exist. Use technology to cut administrative friction. Move faster. Pay talented people well. Take risks proportionate to the crises we face. But don't confuse novelty with capacity, Northern visibility with excellence, or donor coordination with community leadership.
Above all, don't spend the next decade creating thousands of new organizations to absorb billions of dollars while the institutions already capable of moving those resources are kept on pilot grants, short contracts and restricted budgets.
Together, what we've already built could move resources at a far greater scale — efficiently, in local currencies, with accountability embedded in relationships, and with a quality no distant institution can manufacture: proximity.
The polycrisis cannot be solved from outside the places where it's lived. The future of global leadership will not be delivered to the South by a new generation of saviors. It's already being built here.
The money can meet us.
