Transitional arrangements to support governing, coordinating and funding for collective impact

The Funder executive will make decisions yearly about the coming year’s foundational investments, always returning to the ESIC roadmap to ensure we remain grounded in community-identified priorities. The year-1 investments focused on sectoral hubs, regional hubs, open data system, living inventory of AI-enabled digital evidence-synthesis tools (AI-DESTs), and a monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) infrastructure. Possible candidates for year-2 and later investments include:

• continuing to move towards full coverage by the sectoral hubs (i.e., adding more hubs to the 11 that we will have by September 2026, such as a hub focused on housing, transportation and other community amenities) and the regional hubs (i.e., adding Asia Pacific and the Middle East to the ones in Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean that we will have by mid-2026)
• building on the living inventory of AI-DESTS to create an ‘evidence-synthesis studio’
• supporting a methods transformation that will move us to policy-scale AI-enabled living evidence syntheses
• including a capacity-sharing focus on evidence use in decision-making – combining what we’ve learned from around the world (from evidence synthesis) with the many needed forms of local evidence – among the priorities of networks of decision-makers (e.g., government policymakers and citizen-serving NGOs) and evidence intermediaries (e.g., science advisors)
• enabling an established network secretariat to take on the roles of a global secretariat, which could include planning for bi-annual in-person ‘working meetings’ that brings together the ‘community of communities’ (bracketed by optional meetings of individual communities) and advocating for the types of culture, capacity and enablers that would accelerate impacts.
  

These and other ideas for future foundational investments will be brought for discussion to the three groups that constitute our transitional arrangements – the Steering group, Communities council, and Funder executive – and then the FIG executive will make a decision (informed by any input from the other two groups) about what to prioritize as year-2 and later foundational investments. Each funder will then individually decide how to approach its contribution.

The funding mechanism (and amount) will be decided by the FIG executive and/or the individual funder who takes on the priority. If it’s the Wellcome Trust, it could take the form of:

• an open call if this is the priority best served by that approach in the coming fiscal year, in which case the call for sectoral hubs will provide some sense of what a call could look like (e.g., leadership by a group in the Global South, other individual and institutional requirements, timeline for proposal, etc.)
• a procurement, in which case the processes launched in July or August 2026 for the living inventory of AI-DESTs and for the MEL infrastructure would be examples to learn from
• a request to an obvious ‘peak body’ to submit a concept note for peer review.
  

In all cases, the best process in the near term would be that the groups continue to work on a unified pitch, drawing on as many existing groups as possible and identifying additional groups that would round out the comprehensiveness of their coverage of sectors, regions, capabilities and/or equity considerations.