MONTHLY NEWSLETTER: MARCH, 2026 by TAI Collaborative

Dear readers,

We’re excited to share, for the first time with our wider mailing list, theMonthly Newsletter of the Funders’ Roundtable on the Future ofDevelopment.

Once a month, we’ll bring you a curated edition highlighting the most important signals, analysis, and conversations shaping the future ofdevelopment, with a focus on how funding, priorities, and partnerships are evolving across regions and sectors. From shifts in developmentfinance to locally led approaches, philanthropic collaboration, and emerging trends, this newsletter is designed to help make sense of a rapidly changing landscape and surface what matters most for funders today.

Warmly, 

Roundtable Team

Highlight of theMonth

The GTA Dictionary Working Group is launching the “Dictionary of Radical Alternatives”. Built as a collaborative, global archive, it brings together concepts, practices, and worldviews emerging from communities across the Global South that challenge theidea that “there is no alternative.” By reclaiming language and surfacing lived alternatives—from care economies to autonomy and ecological systems—it invites the field to rethink not just solutions, but thevery terms we use to define development.

What’s Emerging Across the Field: 4 Insights on the 4 Shifts

Shift 1: Building a New Era of Development Cooperation

As traditional aid loses centrality, ODI explores how donors are redefining their role, moving into areas like global public goods, policy alignment, and systemic risk. The piece challenges funders to rethink not just how they give, but what responsibilities come with influence in a post-aid world.

Hugo Slim makes the case for “ecological humanitarianism”, a shift that recognizes climate and environmental limits as central to crisis response. Part of the Aid, Rebuilt series, it’s a call to redesign humanitarian action around long-term planetary realities, not just short-term emergencies.

New research commissioned by theChildren’s Investment Fund Foundation and conducted by Public First challenges common assumptions about support for development. Across France, Italy, Ireland, Japan, and Brazil, attitudes are shaped less by views on aid itself and more by broader anxieties—economic insecurity, low trust in institutions, and social fragmentation. Messaging tweaks alone have a limited impact. For the field, this points to a deeper constraint: rebuilding trust and addressing domestic precarity may be as important as making the case for international development.

Nick Danforth revisits recurring claims about the collapse of the liberal international order. But rather than declaring an outright death, the article argues these “obituaries” miss thepoint: the order was always more fragile, contested, and uneven than often portrayed. Moments like this don’t necessarily end the system—they reveal its limits and accelerate its transformation into something more transactional and less predictable.

Shift 2: Remodeling Development Finance Flows

Beyond Eurobonds: unlocking new bond markets, a new analysis from Development Reimagined argues that Africa’s financing challenge is not just about scarcity, but over-reliance on a narrow set of instruments like Eurobonds. Non-traditional bonds—such as Panda, Samurai, Sukuk, and diaspora bonds—offer a pathway to diversify funding sources, reduce currency risk, and tap into new pools of capital.

British International Investment (BII)faces a growing gap between rising expectations and a capital model that no longer fits its mandate. As aid budgets shrink and demands increase, BII still relies largely on shareholder equity, even for lower-risk investments, limiting its ability to fund high-impact, market-creating work. This paper suggests that a more strategic use of its balance sheet, including selective leverage, is now essential.

A sharp provocation argues that Africa no longer depends on aid to drive economic growth. But still relies on it to sustain essential services like health and education. As domestic revenues, remittances, and capital markets expand, the continent is proving more financially resilient. Yet the withdrawal of aid is exposing structural weaknesses: systems once propped up by external funding are struggling to function.

The African Development Bank,UNDP, and partners have launched an ambitious initiative to mobilize up to $10 billion for AI across Africa—targeting infrastructure, skills, and innovation ecosystems. Beyond theheadline number, the move signals a broader shift: development finance is increasingly organizing around strategic sectors like AI, blending public, private, and philanthropic capital to drive long-term growth. If successful, the institutions claim it could position Africa not just as a user of AI, but as a builder of its own digital and economic future.

Shift 3: Strengthening Locally-Led Development

New thinking from NEAR argues that localization efforts have stalled at themargins. What’s needed now is a full transition to locally led ecosystems—where decision-making, resources, and accountability are rooted in local actors.

Australia’s DFAT has released new guidance aimed at moving locally led development from rhetoric to implementation—laying out the “why, what, when, and how” of shifting power across the full program cycle, from design to delivery and evaluation. The emphasis is practical: flexible funding, diverse local leadership (government, civil society, private sector), and adaptive approaches tailored to context.

A new NextBillion piece argues that development communications in Africa must move beyond “visibility” requirements driven by donors toward “velocity,” where storytelling becomes a tool for learning, adaptation, and execution. The shift underway is deeper: toward locally owned, embedded communication systems that align storytelling with how change actually happens on theground. Make narrative not an output, but a core part of development practice.

Who is innovation really serving? Charles Kenny highlights a persistent gap: many of the most pressing challenges in low-income countries remain under-researched and underfunded. He proposes a bold shift—toward global, open-access R&D systems designed around the needs ofthe Global Majority.

Shift 4: Improving Philanthropic Collaboration

In a new piece for Devex, Nancy Lindborg, Peter Laugharn, and Srik Gopal make the case for philanthropy to support the emergence of a more trusted, effective, and durable development system. The Roundtable is central to fostering an ambitious response.

Big money, bigger coordination challenge. A snapshot of the largest philanthropies in development shows the scale of available capital—but also its concentration. As resources grow, so does the need for alignment, transparency, and collective strategies to avoid fragmentation and maximize impact.

Watch the presentation of the key findings from ALNAP's latest report on mutual aid, "Supporting mutual aid: What the evidence tells us," hearing from humanitarians on various key findings and candid conversations on the challenges and opportunities this approach provides the international humanitarian system (and its donors).

What it really takes for funders to work together. New reflections from theJoffe Trust underline that effective funder collaboration goes far beyond coordination—it requires intentional investment in relationships, shared strategy, and a willingness to adapt roles and relinquish control. From “building bridges” across actors to aligning funding around collective goals, the lesson is clear: tackling complex challenges like corruption or democratic erosion demands a “funder+” approach that combines grantmaking with convening and field-building.

Deep Dive: Africa at a Turning Point: From External Financing to Financial Sovereignty

Africa today is navigating a structural turning point—one defined less by inflows of external capital and more by how power, finance, and partnerships are being reconfigured.

The numbers tell the story starkly: thecontinent has moved from being a major recipient of Chinese lending to a net payer, sending more money to China in debt repayments than it receives in new loans—a reversal ofroughly $52 billion over the past decade . At the same time, Adekunle Agbetiloye reports that China is not retreating but recalibrating—shifting toward yuan-based financing, smaller and more commercially viable projects, and financial mechanisms that reduce dependence on the dollar.

This is not just a financial adjustment; it signals a deeper transformation in thearchitecture of global economic relations.

In parallel, new geopolitical configurations are emerging. Partnerships like the growing Türkiye–Italy engagement in Africa reflect a more multipolar landscape, where influence is no longer monopolized by traditional Western donors or a single major lender, but negotiated across a broader set ofactors with overlapping strategic interests. Cooperation is becoming more transactional, more diversified, and increasingly tied to trade, energy, and regional positioning.

Against this backdrop, Africa is turning toward a different development model. For example, interest is growing in models like the China DevelopmentBank, which emphasize coordinated, state-backed financing capable ofabsorbing risk and delivering transformation at scale. The shift is from funding projects to engineering systems of finance. Taken together, these dynamics point to a continent in transition: from borrower to negotiator, from recipient to architect.

Events of Interest