Impact entrepreneurship: a common language for building the meeting point between International Geneva and Finance,
Global Impact Projects: a favorable field of cooperation for the refinancing of International Geneva.
Whereas in December 2025, the Forum raised the challenge of making International Geneva legible to impact finance, the work carried out from January to April 2026 made it possible to size Global Impact Projects capable of channeling this financing toward UN Agencies, International Organizations, and the different types of NGOs.
In view of the December 2026 Forum, the new stage consists in making impact entrepreneurship a language of mutual understanding between IOs, NGOs, foundations, companies, investors, funders and field actors.
Undertaking Impact
In December 2025, the Geneva Forum set out an observation that has become unavoidable: International Geneva lacks neither mandates, nor expertise, and even less legitimacy. Today, all indicators show that it still benefits from a very strong brand image and that this has not been devalued by the collapse of its various forms of funding.
Impact finance, for its part, does not lack capital. What is missing between the two is a shared capacity to transform intentions, programs and international consensus into structured, measurable, governed, fundable projects capable of scaling up.
And this while guaranteeing the organizations that make up International Geneva the full preservation of their autonomy, mandates, professional cultures and respective operating methods, without imposing internal reform on them, an implicit privatization of their missions, or additional organizational complexity.
While impact carries the world of multilateralism and cooperation, entrepreneurship brings an assertive approach centered on the success to be achieved. Two very different worlds that are now capable of changing the game, by forming an alliance while keeping their mutual independence.
The previous 2025 theme — making International Geneva legible to impact finance — made it possible to open this pathway. The Forum, for its part, confirmed its own role: to bring out, clarify and make projects fundable as a continuation of the other forums and spaces that create the dialogue required beforehand.
It now appears a priority to take an additional step. It is no longer enough to make projects legible.
They must now be undertaken.
At the crossroads of such different worlds, with languages and expectations so far apart, impact entrepreneurship thus becomes the new common ground between all actors of International Geneva: international organizations, NGOs, foundations, companies, researchers, investors, family offices, public funders, local authorities and field project leaders.
It is therefore certainly not about turning NGOs into conventional companies, nor about subjecting international cooperation to a short-term profit logic.
It is about enabling each actor to have a shared culture of results, responsibility, measurement, governance, economic model and value creation. And this begins by using and highlighting the tools already created by each of these different entities, several of which were presented at the Geneva Forum 2025 (UNCTAD, UNEP…).
While the Global Impact Projects deploy the full power of impact entrepreneurship, the Organizations of International Geneva that benefit from them keep intact the mandates, missions, values and positions that make them specific.
| View the Geneva Forum 2026 Program | Register as early as possible to benefit from the best pricing conditions |
Why the value of this common and collective terminology?
The entrepreneurial approach followed by the Global Impact Projects provides funders with what they expect: execution capacity, steering, a trajectory, risk management, a viability model, field evidence and a return on investment — financial, social, environmental, territorial or systemic.
The impact approach, for its part, guarantees mission-driven organizations that they do not change their reason for being: they do not become yield machines, but structures capable of making their mandates, skills and alliances bear fruit in the service of the common good.
The stance of the Geneva Forum 2026 is therefore no longer to oppose cooperation and the economy, but to organize their free convergence around enterprising projects.
Global Impact Projects are the vehicle for this convergence. They are not isolated micro-initiatives nor catalogs of good intentions. They are cross-silo architectures capable of functioning at structural levels and of linking public institutions, NGOs, companies, funders, scientists and local operators around common objectives, credible economic models, measurable indicators and adapted financing trajectories. The 2026 Forum, planned as a five-day process at the UN Palais des Nations, is designed around an international boot camp, thematic conferences, cross-silo Deal Factories and a final end-of-week presentation focused on decision-making, financing and scaling up.
The challenge for the Organizations of International Geneva is ultimately no longer only to find money. The challenge is to produce projects capable of receiving that money, using it usefully, demonstrating their results and generating new economic, social and ecological capacities on the ground.
That is why impact entrepreneurship must be understood as a discipline of concretization.
| View the Geneva Forum 2026 Program | Register as early as possible to benefit from the best pricing conditions |
This challenge rests on three levels.
As the result of long, invisible and daily work, there are bankable projects: those that are ultimately selected and made eligible to be proposed to funders, foundations, development banks, family offices and investors. They must be clear, properly sized, measurable, governed and fundable.
Below this line of visibility, there is daily impact business work: sectors, services, revenues, jobs, partnerships, governance models and operational mechanisms that make these projects truly viable through long-term economic intelligence work that makes it possible to obtain sizing perfectly aligned with all the parameters to be taken into account.
More deeply still, there is even longer work: training, coaching, regeneration engineering, concept or practice guidelines, capacity building, selection of the right project leaders, transformation of professional cultures, proof through the field. This work is by far the least visible of all, but it conditions everything else.
In this new stage, the AGILE Impact Finance tool published by the Geneva Foundation for the Future after 3 years of collaborative work with all representatives of finance and the world of cooperation during the previous Geneva Forums, plays a central role. It is not intended to replace the grids of funders, investors or institutions. It serves as a common language, a Rosetta Stone, between field logics and financing requirements, and between these when they are not based on the same grids. The AGILE White Book indeed defines it well as an interface for identification, evaluation, monitoring, support and scaling up, structured around five families: Alignment, Governance, Intention, Leadership and Efficiency.
The Geneva Forum is the stage on which this new grammar is put into action: no longer only making projects understandable, but transforming them into impact enterprises, operational consortiums, territorial platforms, hybrid mechanisms and portfolios capable of attracting grants, donations, guarantees, patient capital and investments.
International Geneva will not refinance itself simply by asking for more subsidies. It will refinance itself by undertaking impact.
Undertaking impact means:
- creating projects that produce results,
- creating useful wealth, beyond simple fundraising,
- giving mission-driven organizations the means to endure,
- enabling finance to reconnect directly with the field,
But undertaking impact also means making Geneva not only the place where the world speaks to itself, but the place where solutions become operable, measurable and fundable, by the World and for the World.
A return to its roots for the Geneva Forum
Since its creation, the Geneva Forum has had the vocation of bringing together worlds that do not naturally speak to one another: scientists, diplomats, NGOs, public institutions, companies, financiers, citizens and field actors. This 2026 edition is therefore a true return to its roots for the Forum. It extends what it has been achieving for so many years: creating the conditions for cooperation between different cultures, so that their alliances produce concrete, useful, measurable projects capable of scaling up.
Today, the challenge is to put this historical capacity at the service of Global Impact Projects and the refinancing of International Geneva. If these worlds learn to undertake impact together, without losing their identity or independence, they can change the game: for their missions, for populations, for living systems and for the Planet.