Awo Ablo

Business adviser, Change Agent, Foodie, Global soul, Idea generator, Life mentor, Parent, Philanthropist, Public servant, Technologist, World traveler

Awo Ablo is President at Co-Impact and serves as a non-executive director on boards at Oracle, the Tony Blair Institute, the Ellison Institute Research Foundation and the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Previously, she was Executive Vice President at the Tony Blair Institute, Director of External Relations at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, and Director of Business Development at BBC Media Action. Drawing on expertise spanning governance, public health, human rights, technology, media, and global development, Awo has led organizations through transformation and hypergrowth. She has also contributed to advisory groups including the Chatham House Global Health Working Group. She mentors corporate leaders through the Black Corporate Board Readiness program at Santa Clara University. Awo undertakes public speaking engagements on her expert topics, bringing a global perspective shaped by living and working across Africa, Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia. She is proudly Ghanaian with British citizenship. Awo holds a Masters degree from SOAS, London University and obtained a BA in Philosophy and Theology from the University of Kent.

Progress!

Fund progress not projects. Look at how far we have come! One of my fave stats is that in 1800, the world population was around 1 billion. 100 years later it was 1.6bn. 100 years later still, in the year 2000, it was 6.17bn. Amazing and unprecedented! What happened between 1900 and 2000? Three important things: 1) Medicine, especially antibiotics and vaccines; 2) Mechanised agriculture; 3) Modern forms of government, which scaled life-saving, technologies; stabilized survival; turned growth from episodic to sustained. We need to fund with this mindset. The biggest barrier to solving the world’s hardest problems isn’t a lack of good ideas, it’s the limits of our imagination, the way we finance and support unproven good ideas and proven solutions. In philanthropy and development, we often fund innovation in fragments. Early-stage non-profits receive small, short-term grants to prove themselves. Later-stage organizations chase restricted funding tied to specific outputs. Governments and markets step in when risk is low and results are more certain. The result is a system optimized for incremental change. My idea is simple - build a truly aligned marketplace for impact, one that matches different kinds of capital to different stages of problem-solving, just as venture ecosystems do for business. Seed funding for experimentation. Flexible growth capital for scaling what works. Long-term, patient finance for systems change. Good news is that these all exist now, but we need clear pathways between them. When capital aligns with mission and stage, we unlock speed, innovation, and resilience. We allow bold ideas to survive long enough to last. We reduce the friction that keeps proven solutions small and burns social entrepreneurs out. And we shift from funding projects to financing and supporting progress. It is not just about money, it’s also about leadership, expertise, coaching and coalitions. Technology can help enormously, for example by enabling scale often at lower unit cost, democratizing knowledge, increasing actionable data and transparency, improving feedback loops and constant improvement, and connecting actors. If we design the impact economy -fund progress not projects, we can move to sustained, systemic change. The world doesn’t just need more capital. It needs capital that is aligned, sequenced, and built to solve problems at scale.

Africa, Governance, Innovation, Philanthropy, Policy, Politics, Strategy, Technology

I hope to create this TED story with the TED community, as I have never been! My life and work has always thrived at the intersection of unlikely worlds — technology and government, philanthropy and markets, early-stage innovation and large-scale systems change. I am drawn to environments where people are buzzing with ideas and a desire to make it happen. I like places where ideas collide across disciplines, because that is where the most transformative solutions emerge. I have long admired the TED commitment to elevating ideas that challenge assumptions and reshape systems. In my own career — from launching a new business line - technology for development at the Tony Blair Institute, joining the board of Oracle corporation as it pivoted to AI, to now helping develop Co-Impact with our amazing Founder, I have seen how powerful ideas can move mountains, inspire people and make progress a reality. I am excited about TED not just as a stage or event, but as a community, a place where thinkers, scientists, business leaders and policymakers engage deeply with one another and move people deeply.

Making my own pasta