With approximately six years left to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the world needs to act urgently. However, the current global impact ecosystem has some critical deficiencies in transforming social impact learning. First, it displays a strong affinity for Global North-led learning models and frameworks. Second, the voices from the Global South in general, particularly of leaders who can bring in the most relevant lived experience—such as women, grassroots leaders, and persons with disabilities—are not sufficiently heard or represented in leadership narratives.

Much local knowledge and wisdom remains untapped and unheard. We continue to struggle with tailoring our approaches to specific contexts, despite knowing that the most pertinent solutions are found within communities. When we fail in our localisation efforts, we face inequitable and unsustainable development and growth.

In response to the need to transform the current learning dynamics within the impact space, we at AVPN began designing a Global Leadership Academy (GLA). The GLA seeks to experiment with new ways of learning centred around locally rooted narratives and methodologies, while ensuring the inclusion of the many voices that remain unheard to transform social impact learning. To this end, we conducted two pilots—in Istanbul, Turkey, and Lucknow, India—that brought together 40 impact leaders from the Global South.

What follows are the design principles that emerged, with ‘emerged’ being the keyword: We did not start with them in mind. They are highly specific to how we thought we could best realise the mission of GLA. We surely don’t want to imply that they should be taken as ‘universal truths’. We don’t have extensive data to validate them. So, take them as ‘a story’, and we hope you find some inspiration in them.

1. Love the Problem To Transform Social Impact Learning

In the impact space, we don’t like the problems we face—they make our world a worse place to live. As a result, we don’t want to spend too much time in the company of those problems.

Read the full article about transforming social impact learning by Kurt Peleman, Nadya Pryana, Sejal Maheshwari, and Yee Zhen Ang at India Development Review.