The 2026 Skoll Awardees — ChildLife Foundation, SmartStart, and Indus Action — offer a practical lesson in systems change: lasting impact rarely comes from working around public institutions. It comes from strengthening them, designing services around real human journeys, building shared infrastructure, and securing the patient capital required to stay the course.

“When we were meeting other awardees, we were in some very rare company. Somebody is feeding six hundred thousand school-going children a day. That’s the person sitting next to you,” says Dr. Ahson Rabbani, CEO of ChildLife Foundation. “You start feeling that there’s so much more that you can do because there are so many other people who have been on this path before you.”

Every year, the Skoll Award for Social Innovation recognizes organizations applying novel or reimagined solutions to societal problems in ways that contribute to lasting, systemic change. The award is designed for organizations whose impact has already been demonstrated and where multi-year funding, field-building support, and strategic guidance can help accelerate what comes next.

This year’s cohort includes three awardees: ChildLife Foundation, SmartStart, and Indus Action.

ChildLife Foundation is the Pakistani nonprofit that has spent more than a decade transforming emergency pediatric care by embedding specialist-level treatment, telemedicine, and centralized data systems into public hospitals. Working through government infrastructure, it now connects hundreds of district hospitals to pediatric specialists and reaches a large share of Pakistan’s children. In the emergency rooms it manages, reported pediatric mortality has fallen from 12.7% in 2013 to 1.2% today.

Photo by Isabelle Swiderski

Grace Matlhape, a former CEO of loveLife and an Ashoka Fellow, leads SmartStart, the South African social enterprise tackling two of the country’s most stubborn challenges at once: access to early childhood development in low-income communities and unemployment among women in those same communities. Through a social franchise model, SmartStart enables women to operate licensed early learning programs from homes and community spaces, with a network now reaching 160,000 children each week.

Tarun Cherukuri, also an Ashoka Fellow, leads Indus Action, which works to close the gap between the social protection entitlements that exist on paper for India’s most vulnerable citizens and the benefits they actually receive. Operating across much of India, Indus Action combines citizen experience design, civic technology, community outreach, and government capacity-building to help citizens access public benefits that would otherwise remain out of reach.

So how does an organization contribute to lasting, systemic social change? Listening to all three, several common threads begin to emerge.

Believing in government as an actor in innovation

In The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato debunks one of the most damaging myths of recent decades: that government is incompatible with innovation as a funder, partner, market shaper, or client. All three organizations build their models on the opposite premise.

“The government is already doing a lot of work,” says Cherukuri. “We have personas on the government side called shapers, sponsors, and firefighters. Over time, we realized we need an authorizing environment across three levels, so that political shocks don’t affect the long-term work we’re trying to do.”

Health care, too, is generally left to federal or local administrators, and few countries earn a consistently positive report card. For ChildLife, this was not a reason to bypass government. It was an opening for sustained partnership. “We were not out to blame the government,” says Rabbani. “It’s very easy to criticize. We believe that the problem is so huge that everybody has to be part of the solution.”

Yet citizens are often still confused about where and how to access government-led services. Designing for that journey from a localized, experiential perspective requires more than good intentions. It requires systems that meet people where they are.

Designing services on shared infrastructure

At the center of each solution sits a nuanced understanding of the experiences of different actors: children and caregivers, women practitioners, doctors, civil servants, parents, frontline workers, and citizens trying to navigate complex public systems. This stakeholder-centric approach enables distributed value creation and makes a far more compelling case for engagement.

SmartStart frames its work as a “quadruple benefit”: better outcomes for children, economic participation for caregivers, stable income for women practitioners, and a more coherent early childhood development system. With a goal of reaching one million children annually by 2030, it is shifting from a franchise model toward what it calls an “open platform” — sharing tools, curriculum, and data infrastructure so government, funders, and other NGOs can build on top of it.

The most interesting thing about this year’s Skoll Awardees is not simply what they have built, but where they have chosen to build it: inside public systems.

ChildLife also works from within the public system, training government doctors and deploying telemedicine to connect pediatric specialists nationwide. Indus Action has gone a step further, finding citizens where they are and, in parallel, publishing its platform as an open-source Digital Public Good on GitHub. States are now picking it up and requesting maintenance support to make it their own. That kind of buy-in is another building block in the story of scale.

Photo by Isabelle Swiderski

Using narrative to make futures possible

Storytelling is often discussed as a communications tool, a way to make complex ideas accessible and easier to remember. But for systems builders, narrative also does something more fundamental: it helps people imagine futures that do not yet exist. To tell a good story about the future is to make that future more thinkable and, by extension, more possible.

SmartStart nurtures this directly. “We work to co-author new societal narratives, build shared infrastructure, and establish common planning and monitoring systems,” says Matlhape. “This ensures that every stakeholder sees their role in achieving universal access.”

“Our biggest success was that our vision became the government’s political slogan,” recalls Rabbani. “It was a dream come true when the government adopts your manifesto and makes it its manifesto.”

We need manifestos. We need collective visions of desirable futures compelling enough to prompt action today.

Taking the long view

In The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric writes that we treat the future as “a distant colonial outpost,” a kind of temporal no-man’s-land detached from our present actions. Politicians live for the next election, CEOs for the next quarter, and future generations are too often imagined as a blurry, featureless mass, when they are thought of at all.

Designing for impact is not enough. Designing for adoption is the harder, less glamorous, and more consequential task.

Despite frequent calls to support systemic change with a longer lens, few funders are willing to take that risk. Shifting this mindset requires intention in time horizon, due diligence, and moral vision.

Cherukuri describes the Skoll process itself as representative of that shift: “The dialogues that happened through due diligence and at the Skoll Forum validated us. They helped us narrow our strategic priorities for the next five to ten years.” Rabbani echoes the observation: “Working with Skoll, the next step became clearer. In these 350 hospitals, the footfall is 20 million. We are only treating the 2 million serious ones, but another 18 million are there. It is no longer an opportunity. It’s a responsibility for us.”

Matlhape, too, speaks in decades. “I dream of a nation where early learning is genuinely viewed as the most critical investment we can make in our human capital,” she says. It is a horizon well beyond any single funding cycle, but one she and her team are already building toward.

Building on hope

To bolster these visions, we need hope. Collaboration, responsibility, the daily work of managing external partners while nurturing internal culture — all of it asks for resilience, hope, and joy, in the moment and for the journey to come.

Community helps with that. There is a particular kinship that comes from discovering you are not alone in the scale of what you are attempting.

Growing up during apartheid, Matlhape knows this well. “I know what it feels like to be excluded when I felt like I had real capacity,” she says. “I want to solve the problem forever, not just the symptoms.”

Hope is not a fortuitous bonus to systems change but a precondition for it.

It might also be the bet the Skoll Foundation made when it built its model around multi-year support: that hope is not a fortuitous bonus to systems change but a precondition for it, and that funding it requires the same patience the work itself demands. A long-horizon commitment is itself a public statement that our most persistent issues are not quarterly problems, and that the organizations capable of solving them deserve partners willing to measure success on the same timescale.

“I generally believe the long arc of history bends towards justice,” Cherukuri says. “I come in a long stream of work — in two hundred years our ancestors gave us political freedoms. In some ways, we’re working for easier freedoms, like socioeconomic freedoms. That gives me a lot of hope that we can bequeath a better world for posterity.”

It is a hope that asks something of funders too: to have the vision to stay the course for the decades it takes for a system to morph. ChildLife, SmartStart, and Indus Action are each proof that this kind of patience pays off.