Why the Development Sector Doesn’t Need Corporate Salvation

Dismantling the myth

 

I came across this post on Linkedin reviewing the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa that promised to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farmers while cutting food insecurity in half.

It does appear that AGRA fell short in precisely the way many development efforts fail when they borrow too much from the corporate playbook. Agriculture, like education or justice or health, isn’t just a system to optimise. It’s a relationship to be tended. And this is where so much of the venture-philanthropy, impact-investing, startup-accelerator logic falls apart. It’s trying to steer a sailboat by owning a larger share of it, rather than understanding the wind.

This essay is a reflection on why the development sector doesn’t need corporate salvation. In fact, it may be time we asked why corporate sectors keep failing at social change, despite the capital, tools, and confidence they bring. I’ve sat in too many conversations where venture capitalists earnestly suggest that NGOs just need better dashboards or tighter management systems. And while some of that is true, the deeper question is: what worldview are we importing when we adopt those tools? And what are we unconsciously pushing aside?

The Myth of Corporate Superiority

The idea that non-profits should be more like businesses has become oddly persistent. It usually starts with a conversation about efficiency and ends with someone quoting Drucker. But this mindset mistakes the logic of return for the logic of repair.

Corporate success is structured around extraction and acceleration. Development work is structured around complexity, consent, and collective well-being. These are not just different strategies. They’re different worlds.

I’ve even heard this logic up close. On a flight, I found myself seated next to a group of venture capitalists who were excitedly discussing their forays into philanthropy. Their conversation was peppered with terms like “metrics,” “scalability,” and “return on investment.” When they learned I worked in the development sector, one of them leaned in and said, “Have you considered running your organisation more like a business?”

It was well-meaning. But also wildly misplaced.

VC vs Philanthropy: A Window Into the Divide

Venture capital is about placing high-risk bets in search of exponential financial return. That means time horizons are short, ownership is central, and control is non-negotiable. Founders often have to trade autonomy for capital, and investors focus on pattern recognition, growth curves, and exits.

Philanthropy, when it’s at its best, operates differently. It works on timescales that make 10-year funds look rushed. It deals with interdependent systems, not isolated products. It listens more than it directs. It works in relationship, not just in return.

And yet, over the past two decades, we’ve seen a growing push to make philanthropy act more like VC. Outcome-based funding. Accelerators for NGOs. ROI-style language about “impact per dollar.” The result is that we’re now rewarding interventions that scale neatly, measure cleanly, and photograph well, while deprioritising the slow, deep, often invisible work of shifting systems.

Left-Brain Thinking and the Loss of Context

The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes about the difference between left- and right-hemisphere thinking. The left hemisphere is precise, focused, and great at problem-solving. The right hemisphere is holistic, contextual, and attuned to nuance. Both are necessary. But McGilchrist argues that modern society has become dominated by left-brain logic: breaking the world into parts, standardising what can be measured, ignoring what can’t.

Venture capital is a left-brain institution. It is built for clarity, categorisation, and abstraction. The development sector, at its best, is a right-brain project. It is about wholeness, context, and relationships. It’s no surprise that when we try to impose VC thinking onto complex social systems, we end up missing the point entirely.

What Gets Distorted When We Import Corporate Logic

There’s a long list. First, the pressure for short-term results leads to over-promising and under-delivering. Targets often look great in a pitch deck, but likely bear weaker connection to the messy realities of farming in the Sahel or education in India.

Second, the obsession with scale sidelines local knowledge. The assumption is that success must be replicable, which often leads to flattening out context. But context is the point. A solution that works for one village might not make sense in the next one over.

Third, corporate approaches often reintroduce power imbalances under the guise of innovation. When funders hold the capital and the metrics, they end up dictating what counts as success. Communities are left navigating someone else’s agenda.

And finally, the work that matters most—like long-term community organising, policy engagement, or healing generational trauma—doesn’t fit cleanly into KPIs. It’s not that these things can’t be tracked. It’s that they shouldn’t be forced into performance dashboards designed for growth-stage startups.

The future of social change isn’t going to be built on borrowed logics. If anything, it may depend on whether we can stop translating everything into a language that makes it more palatable to capital.

The Development Sector Has Its Own Intelligence

The best development work doesn’t scale. It spreads. It grows through relationship and story, not replication. It is slow by design because legitimacy takes time. It learns in public. It values emergence over control.

Take Agami, for example. Their work in online dispute resolution has helped build a field, not just launch a product. They’ve nurtured an ecosystem by holding space, adapting their role, and staying rooted in the needs of the community. Agami doesn’t measure success in exits. It measures it in the strength of the ecosystem and the relationships it has enabled.

This kind of work doesn’t need to be rescued by corporate logic. It needs to be protected from it.

The Way Forward: Embracing Development Sector Wisdom

Rather than looking to the corporate world for salvation, it’s time for a paradigm shift where we recognise and value the unique approaches of the development sector. This shift involves several key elements:

1. Reframing Success: We need to move beyond narrow, short-term metrics and embrace more holistic, long-term measures of impact that capture the full complexity of social change.
2. Valuing Process: Instead of focusing solely on outcomes, we must recognise the value of the development sector’s processes—community engagement, capacity building, and the slow work of changing narratives and mindsets.
3. Embracing Complexity: Rather than seeking simple, scalable solutions, we need to get comfortable with the messy, non-linear nature of social change.
4. Fostering Collaboration: We should prioritise approaches that bring diverse stakeholders together, recognising that no single entity or sector has all the answers.
5. Investing in Learning: We need to create space for continuous reflection, adaptation, and learning, understanding that this is crucial for addressing complex, evolving challenges.

This is not to say there’s no room for cross-sector learning or collaboration. Indeed, addressing our most pressing social issues will require all sectors—public, private, and civil society—to work together in new and innovative ways. However, this collaboration must be based on mutual respect and recognition of each sector’s unique value.

As we navigate the complex, interconnected challenges of our “BANI” world—brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible—we need more holistic, systems-level thinking that characterises the development approach, not less. It’s time to challenge the narrative of corporate superiority and recognise that the path to a more just, sustainable, and flourishing world may well be illuminated by the wisdom and practices of the development sector.

The next time someone suggests that non-profits should be more like businesses, we should pause and consider: what if businesses should be more like non-profits instead? What if they learned how to stay instead of just scale? What if they measured value in trust, dignity, and regeneration? After all, most VC-funded businesses never turn a profit.

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Originally published on Substack on 15 May 2025. Read on Substack →