Business of Impact: The Blueprint for Systems Action

More than five centuries ago, the institution that hosted Business of Impact 2026 faced a problem it could not solve by working harder. Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa, founded in 1498 by Queen Leonor, took in abandoned babies through a revolving wheel in its wall and paid nurses to feed them. Then, as Vice-Provedora Rita Prates told delegates, staff noticed that some of those nurses were the babies' own mothers, coming back to be paid for feeding the children they had given up. So Santa Casa began paying mothers a small allowance to keep their babies at home.

It was an early lesson in fixing the cause instead of the symptom, and it came with a personal footnote. João Machado, President of Fundação Ageas, told the closing session that one of Machado's great-grandfathers had been left on one of those very wheels.

Sally Uren of Forum for the Future put the same idea in modern terms in the opening keynote.

"Systems aren't broken. They're doing exactly what they were set up to do."

Sally Uren, Executive Director & Chief Accelerator Officer, Forum for the Future

Europe's post-war food system was built to deliver as many calories as possible, and its economy to maximise profit. Change the goal, Uren argued, and the system starts to behave differently.

On 15 and 16 September, right beside the national lottery machines that still fund Santa Casa's work, delegates tested that idea across three tracks: Unblocking Collaboration, the Just Energy Transition and Impact Infrastructure. Most sessions were workshops, so people spent more time talking in small groups than listening from rows of chairs. Alan Barbieri of The Human Safety Net liked that the programme was "grounded in theory and driven by practice", with one question running through every session: what is this system actually set up to do?

One problem, three angles

As can be expected with intertwined problematics, the tracks kept running into each other. Water.org's work with the consumer goods company Reckitt, presented by Sophie Faujour, Head of Europe at Water.org, is a good example. Millions of families lack a tap or a toilet, not because the technology is missing, but because they cannot borrow to pay for it. Local lenders were reluctant to provide the money. "A sewing machine or a truck generates revenue. A toilet doesn't," Faujour said. Reckitt's donations paid to train lenders and prove that the loans were safe, and borrowers repaid 98% of them. Around $10 million in grants has so far unlocked more than $155 million in loans, reaching 2.7 million people in India, Indonesia, Kenya and Nigeria. Reckitt has since invested £17 million of its own money in Water.org's investment funds.

That single case spoke to all three tracks. It needed partners collaborating with clear roles, the right mix of grants and investment, and careful measurement to demonstrate that the loans were being repaid.

The same pattern was seen in workforce. Europe's energy companies cannot find 76% of the skilled workers they need, while millions of Europeans cannot find work. In Madrid, Generation Spain, EDP and the city council recently trained people who are rarely hired and placed them in solar installation jobs. "It's a model that works," said Estela De La Cruz, CEO of Generation Spain, provided that the training is designed in conjunction with employers.

Italy has gone further. Its Digital Republic Fund, financed by banking foundations in return for tax credits, has spent €170 million teaching digital skills to 120,000 people. Compared with a control group, participants were 12 percentage points more likely to find work after the programme. Gerardo Franco of Microsoft argued that this is where things are heading: skills training has to become permanent public infrastructure, owned by governments, instead of a string of one-off courses.

Honesty in the room

Closing the event, Impact Europe's chief executive described the tone of the two days.

"There has been a very clear intellectual honesty about the challenges that we face. This has been coupled with a healthy sense of optimism for the things that we can do together."

Angela Wiebeck, CEO, Impact Europe

The honesty came with specifics. João Machado of Fundação Ageas warned Portuguese colleagues that the European Social Fund will stop treating social innovation as a priority from 2028. Portugal Inovação Social, which pays for the country's results-based social contracts, depends on that money for 85% of its budget. "We are not feeling the sense of urgency that, in my inner gut, I'm feeling," Machado said.

The sense of urgency Machado describes has been at the core of the evolution of the Portuguese impact ecosystem. Graça Fonseca, now Chief Imagination Officer of the Futura Foundation, recalled 2014, when Lisbon City Council, the Gulbenkian Foundation, universities and a start-up ran one of Portugal's first social impact bonds: a contract that paid out only if teaching nine-year-olds to code improved their school results. It did. "There was no infrastructure at that time for social impact investment. There was nothing," Fonseca said. The impact investor Maze and Portugal Inovação Social both grew out of that group, so one small contract left Portugal with an investor and a public fund that still back results-based contracts today.

"Cooperation is not just nice to have. It is something that creates infrastructure."

Graça Fonseca, Chief Imagination Officer, Futura Foundation

Arguments that stayed open

Not everything was settled over coffee. Wilson Lihn of GVP Climate challenged the idea that impact investors must accept lower returns. Luís Menezes, chief executive of Ageas Group Portugal, replied that social enterprises should never carry the heavy debts common in private equity, and that many investors now want something to talk about at dinner besides their 6% return.

Government's role divided people too. Ana Cretu of ERSTE Foundation said the state "will always be reactive", so private money should test ideas first and bring them to government once they work. Microsoft's Franco insisted that governments must own national skills programmes from the start. Both may be right, depending on the problem.

From talk to commitments

What set this edition apart was the number of concrete commitments made in the room:

• Impact Europe opened its member activity monitor. More than 60 delegates signed up during the event, and all 320-plus members are next.
• Impact Europe will publish reporting guidance for foundations in the coming months, and Impact Frontiers has opened a consultation on its reporting guidelines.
• The new Advisory Circle, backed by Laudes Foundation, will choose the two or three themes where members should pool their money.
• Water.org will launch a $200 million blue bond in December, with the World Bank's IFC taking on part of the risk, in time for the UN Water Conference.
• Fundação Ageas and the La Caixa Foundation will launch a joint impact investment partnership within weeks.
• We Share Forward Foundation and Bayer Foundation are starting an alliance to fund women entrepreneurs, just as other funders pull back.
• Santa Casa will roll out Apoiar Mais, its new funding programme for culture, health, education and social organisations, by the end of the year.
• Generation Italy is inviting partners to shape a proposal for joint public, private and philanthropic funding in the EU's next long-term budget.

What Lisbon adds up to

Taken together, the sessions reveal a way of working. Be clear about what the system should achieve. Put early, patient money where it can prove that a model works, then bring in commercial lenders and institutional investors to scale it. Report results with enough context for others to judge them. Build partnerships around a specific transaction, with money committed and roles agreed, as Water.org and Reckitt did, and bring in the employers and public funders who control hiring and long-term budgets at the design stage, not after the pilot.

For Ana Cretu of ERSTE Foundation, that is what Impact Europe's events are for. Impact Europe, Cretu wrote afterwards, "is one of the few places where the full impact ecosystem truly comes together".

Patrick Somerhausen of ImpaktEU captured the spirit of the gathering in a line Wiebeck repeated at the close: in impact investing, "there is so much to do, we can't afford to compete."

The event ended with Santa Casa's lottery machines drawing a winning ticket to Impact Week 2027, which will take place in Basel during the first week of October. By then, the blue bond, the new partnerships and the Advisory Circle's first choices should show whether the commitments made in Lisbon held fast.