When the Room Agrees: What the SID-US Future of Development Forum Confirmed About the Path Beyond Grants

Last Thursday, March 26, I walked into the SID-US Future of Development Forum, an unconference-style event in Washington, D.C., that brought together development practitioners, former USAID and State Department officials, consultants, and NGO leaders to wrestle with one defining question: where does international development go from here?

I went as a participant. I stayed someone who, in almost every conversation, found a direct echo of what I have been writing about in this blog series for the past three months.

The premise was familiar

The opening keynote, delivered by Enoh T. Ebong of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was stark. The global development architecture built over eight decades is at its sharpest inflection point in history, she said. USAID has been dismantled. The UK and France have each cut their ODA commitments by roughly 40 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Of the 11 largest European donors, only Spain has committed to increasing development funding. The Lancet projects up to 14 million deaths by 2030 due to cuts in aid funding.

These are not abstract statistics. They are the collapse of the grant-dependent model playing out in real time.

And yet, Ebong did not leave the room in despair. She argued that “deals without an enabling environment are not sustainable,” quoting ExxonMobil’s CEO, who told President Trump that a successful long-term investment must be a win for the people. That is another way of saying what this blog series has argued since January: profit and purpose are not enemies. They are co-dependent.

The breakout that confirmed the thesis

The session I was most eager to join was “Rethinking Development Finance and Financial Models.” It did not disappoint.

The conversation moved quickly from definitions to something more interesting: the question of whether NGOs can — and should — generate revenue, attract private investment, and provide returns to people who fund them not as donors, but as investors. I asked the room directly: what about an NGO raising capital not as a donation, but as an investment, from people who can spare a modest amount, expect a small return, and know they are doing good in the world?

What struck me was not disagreement. It was recognition. Several participants pointed to examples already underway: Save the Children Global Ventures, Mercy Corps Ventures, ACDI Voca’s investment arm, and FHI 360’s private investment wing. Others raised the Grameen Bank model, the sustainability of microfinance institutions, and the importance of building local funding infrastructure that outlasts any five-year grant cycle.

The room landed on a spectrum — from purely philanthropic to purely commercial — and acknowledged that sustainable development finance lives somewhere in the middle, negotiating between private returns and public good. That is the Resilience Portfolio thesis in practice.

The private sector conversation Was Equally Honest

In the second breakout, “The Evolving Role of the Private Sector,” the discussion went straight to the point. The very first framing question the facilitator posed was: “The private sector is not a philanthropy.” Businesses are not foundations. So, how should development professionals work with the business community for development outcomes?

I took the conversation in a different direction. I proposed that NGOs stop thinking of corporations primarily as funders and start putting profit at the center of every partnership design. Help a corporation make more money sustainably. Invest in a startup. Take a revenue share. Buy equity. Create a virtuous circle in which the NGO earns, the company earns, and the communities on the ground benefit from better products, higher yields, and better services.

A participant from DCA — the Danish development organization — confirmed this is already underway: they have allocated a portion of government funding into private investments that leverage capital for small businesses in-country. Others pointed to the Finnish development investment bank, which focuses on women-led companies, and to UK development investment bonds as further proof that the model is real and scaling. These are precisely the mechanisms that Chris Meyer zu Natrup of MzN International will anchor in the blended finance breakout on April 14.

The barriers were real and named: trust between sectors, different time horizons (the private sector wants quarterly results; development is a decade-long process), and the structural difficulty of getting seed capital for NGO venture arms that lack a traditional track record. None of this is unsolvable. And this blog series exists precisely to work through them.

What the forum got right, and what it left open

The final session recap captured something important. Across both breakout groups I attended, a common thread emerged: the development sector was overly dependent on a single funding source, too slow to build its own narrative, and too reluctant to speak plainly about sustainability, returns, and profit. As one participant noted, too many organizations had built no capacity beyond grant execution; the moment their grant obligations ended, they collapsed. That is a structural design failure.

Mark Castellino, who facilitated the development finance session and serves on the SID board, offered a provocation that stayed with me: “Experts are usually experts in the past, not the future.” He said it to frame why the unconference format matters, because the people most qualified to explain how development finance has worked are often the least equipped to imagine what it could become. It is a fair warning for all of us in this sector.

The forum was not short on diagnosis. What it lacked — by design, given its unconference format — was a space to move from diagnosis to decision. That is the gap the Beyond Grants platform is built to fill.

Join us on April 14

On April 14, 2026, from 1:30 to 4:30 PM at InterAction HQ in Washington, D.C., I am convening an invitation-only working session — “Beyond Grants: The Money Problem” — during World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings week. This is a practitioner-led workshop with 25 to 30 NGO leaders, development finance specialists, private sector executives, and impact investors — including Tessie San Martin of FHI 360, Perry Yeatman of Save the Children Global Ventures, and Chris Meyer zu Natrup of MzN International — coming together with one goal: to move from “something needs to change” to “here is what we are going to do.” The three parallel breakout sessions — on NGO-corporate partnerships, earned revenue mechanisms, and blended finance structures — will generate practical, tested ideas that practitioners can take back to their organizations the next morning. Tom Hart, CEO of InterAction, will open the conversation. The room will close with individual commitments.

I left the SID forum knowing that the people who need to have this conversation are already circling it. April 14 is where it happens.