What stayed with me most from Deepali Khanna’s conversation was not the scale of The Rockefeller Foundation’s programmes, but the philosophy underneath them. Again and again, she returned to a deceptively simple question: why us? Why should philanthropy intervene here rather than government, domestic philanthropy, communities or the market? That question changes the role of philanthropy. It shifts the focus away from funding activity for its own sake and toward identifying the specific constraint that other actors are not yet able or willing to address. Sometimes that constraint is risk. Sometimes it is policy uncertainty, weak institutional capability, fragmented relationships, missing evidence or the absence of a credible first mover. In Deepali Khanna’s account, philanthropy becomes most useful when it can enter precisely at that point, help the wider system move, and build the conditions under which others can do more.
Her account of energy access in India illustrates the pattern well. When Rockefeller began working on decentralised energy, private-sector actors identified three obstacles: an uncertain policy environment, a lack of debt finance, and scepticism about whether low-income communities would pay for electricity. The response was not to treat these as three separate projects. The foundation worked with government on enabling mini-grid policy, provided debt where commercial capital was reluctant to move, and supported implementation that could test assumptions about customer behaviour. Deepali Khanna cites repayment rates of 99.6% in the communities involved, using that experience to argue that low-income households would pay when the service created value and providers could be held accountable. What matters here is the sequence. Philanthropic capital did not simply substitute for the market; it helped produce the evidence, policy confidence and early financial pathway that made a larger market more plausible. That same logic eventually fed into the Global Energy Alliance, where Rockefeller committed substantial grant capital alongside other philanthropies in an effort to mobilise action at much greater scale. The interesting question is therefore not simply how much philanthropy funded, but what became possible for governments, communities and investors because philanthropy took the first risk.
A second pattern runs through Deepali Khanna’s remarks on climate, food, health and energy: people experience problems as systems even when institutions experience them as sectors. She makes the point through the everyday reality of a woman who does not experience agriculture, education and health on separate days, even though organisations may approach her through different programmes. Climate makes this fragmentation harder to ignore because extreme heat, energy access, food systems, health, livelihoods and infrastructure can become parts of the same chain of risk. Rockefeller’s emerging work on regenerative school meals is interesting from this perspective. The proposition connects school feeding with smallholder procurement, regenerative agriculture, farmer incomes, nutrition and climate outcomes rather than treating each as a separate intervention. The same reasoning appears in Khanna’s discussion of state-level climate coordination, where she asks how governments and external actors can respond when climate cuts across ministries and mandates. The deeper point is not that every problem needs a new “systems programme.” It is that effective philanthropy has to recognise when the real constraint lies in the spaces between existing programmes and institutions.
That is also why her emphasis on listening matters. Deepali Khanna traces much of her philosophy back to her early experience in Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar, where she learned both that communities hold knowledge outsiders do not and that “the community” is never a single, homogeneous voice. Women, young people, vulnerable groups and more powerful local actors can experience the same place very differently. Her argument is therefore more demanding than simply calling for participation. Institutions have to listen closely enough to understand whose knowledge is missing, while also recognising that local experience has to interact with evidence, policy and institutional capability. That same principle appears in her story about something as small as deciding where an electric light should be placed. Men and women proposed different uses for the same asset; listening to the women changed the practical value the electricity created. The lesson travels much further than the anecdote. Local knowledge becomes strategically important when it changes the design of the intervention, not merely when it is collected.
The conversation also made me think differently about convening. Philanthropy often describes itself as a convener, but Deepali’s examples suggest that the useful question is not whether people were brought together; it is what coordination made possible that could not have happened through bilateral relationships alone. She speaks about bringing governments, philanthropies, civil society, researchers and private actors into the same conversation; about creating visibility across actors working in a state such as Maharashtra; and about using spaces such as Bellagio to bring people with very different expertise into sustained engagement. The more demanding form of collaboration is therefore not simply assembling relevant institutions. It is creating enough shared understanding, trust and accountability for actors with different mandates to take complementary action. This is where philanthropy’s relational assets may matter as much as its financial ones.
Deepali’s “marathon mindset” adds another dimension. Philanthropic organisations are often under pressure to demonstrate results quickly, yet many of the changes she describes require time for evidence, policy, regulation, institutional confidence and new markets to develop. She contrasts this with situations in which a practical bottleneck can be removed quickly and outcomes change almost immediately. The distinction is useful because not every problem should be treated as either a sprint or a marathon. The harder leadership task is recognising which parts can move quickly and which institutional conditions must be patiently built around them. In this sense, persistence is not simply about funding something for longer. It is about staying involved long enough for the surrounding system to become capable of absorbing and sustaining what works.
Deepali describes this wider ambition as “building the shared future” – a future in which the Global South is not simply the recipient of solutions but helps shape the principles, institutions and models through which global problems are addressed. It connects strongly with something I have been trying to understand through the idea of shared resilience: when risks cross communities, sectors and institutions, resilience cannot be produced by any one actor alone; it has to be built through shared understanding of risk, connected institutions, local capability, coordinated action and the right forms of finance. For me, the interesting intersection between a shared future and shared resilience is therefore practical rather than rhetorical – what institutions, relationships and forms of capital allow people who share a risk to act on it together?
She also makes an important point about institutional agility: a long-term commitment should not mean a fixed way of working; institutions have to remain nimble enough to listen, learn and continually reinvent their role as technologies, national priorities and the surrounding system change, or they risk losing relevance.
There is another important idea running through the interview: development knowledge is becoming more multidirectional. Khanna repeatedly argues for a stronger role for the Global South in shaping solutions and describes efforts to move learning between India, Southeast Asia, Africa and other regions. This suggests a different role for international philanthropy from the older model of carrying expertise from one part of the world to another. Its comparative advantage may increasingly lie in recognising useful knowledge wherever it emerges, connecting it across contexts, financing early experimentation and helping institutions shorten one another’s learning curves. That requires humility because models cannot simply be transplanted. Khanna is explicit about co-creation and about adapting lessons rather than assuming that what worked in energy will automatically work in food systems or health.
The deeper pattern I heard in the conversation is therefore that philanthropy creates leverage when it works on the conditions around action. It can absorb early risk, build evidence, strengthen institutions, connect actors, make hidden knowledge visible, create confidence around new models and help different forms of capital enter at the right time. None of those functions requires philanthropy to own the eventual solution. In fact, the more interesting test may be whether the surrounding system becomes more capable because the philanthropic intervention happened.
That leaves me with a question that feels useful well beyond philanthropy:
What becomes possible for other actors because this institution was there?
For philanthropy, that may be a better measure of leverage than the number of projects funded or even the amount of additional capital mobilised. Did government acquire a workable policy pathway? Did communities gain greater influence over decisions affecting them? Did investors become able to take a risk they could not previously evaluate? Did institutions that had been working separately learn to coordinate? Did an experiment become something others could adopt and sustain? Khanna’s account suggests that philanthropy is at its most consequential when the answer is yes—not because it replaced other actors, but because it made the wider system more capable of acting.
Arunabha Bhattacharya 
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