This two-part article, looks at how our members’ voices are helping us create signals that can move our industry from fragile to thriving.
In this first part, we will explore the stories that led us to shift our focus away from ‘who to blame’ and instead focus on Why. It all started with a single phone call.
The moment that broke the script
Why start here? Because that moment – donor withdrawal, stalled programmes – exposes three linked truths:
- Incubators operate on fragile economics,
- Learning rarely travels between organizations,
- The system lacks the signals that funders and policymakers need to make catalytic decisions.
Stories have the power to drive real change. When we see them as signals, they guide us to make better, evidence-based decisions and smarter investments in our sector.
Everything changed with one phone call. A network member was ready to sign a major grant, but the donor pulled out at the last minute. The programme stopped, staff faced uncertainty, and months of progress were lost.
We heard stories like this again and again across our network. A clear, painful pattern started to emerge:
“One donor decides to withdraw and everything stops.”
Hearing these stories repeatedly made us wonder: why are mission-driven organisations with dedicated teams, proven results, and strong local knowledge still so vulnerable?
Instead of asking “who failed?” we started to ask, “What is the root cause of this problem? What do we really know about how incubators work, and what evidence could change how the industry operates?”
What our members keep telling us
When you collect hundreds of member conversations, certain patterns emerge. Through our ongoing funding incubation research, grounded in interviews and direct member engagements, three interlocking challenges stand out, based on repeated first-hand operational experiences:
1) Duplication and Overlap:The same people in different rooms
Networks and convenings are full of energy, but often the same actors rotate through the same conversations. Our members have repeatedly described a dizzying landscape of forums where the same actors rotate through the same conversations. The immediate cost of such duplication and overlap is time and morale: Attention is spread thin across repeated conversations without producing sustained change.
2) Funding Precarity: Planning for the next grant, not next year
Short-term, project-based funding was mentioned in almost every session. In many conversations, investors have said, “Incubators are not producing the deals for us.” Our members also tell us that funders often pull back or shift their support, and grants end, causing programmes to stall. The donor-withdrawal story is not unusual; it is inevitably baked into the funding cycle. Members report having to reorganise their strategies to fit this cycle instead of focusing on long-term impact for the whole ecosystem.
During our Bangkok Potluck in August 2025, members identified money as one of the main challenges for experimenting with different revenue streams.
3) Fragmented Learning & Data Gaps: We don’t speak the same language
Data Fragmentation has always been a problem when it comes to this industry. Recently, ANDE also hosted a workshop discussing Data Fragmentation in Africa’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystems. Our members consistently tell us that there’s no common yardstick, no existence of the benchmarking data. During one of the interviews with our members, Devansh from Enviu captured it simply: “There’s a dearth of knowledge on incubation itself.” And without shared benchmarks or interoperable systems, promising practices stay local at best rather than being scaled. Several members asked for just one thing: a way to compare and learn that respects local differences but makes comparison possible.
From our engagements across Africa and Asia, the pattern is strikingly similar: donor dependency, fractured learning, and frequent duplication show up in multiple contexts. The shape of the problem is consistent but the manifestation differs by country and sector.
And the practical cost of not addressing these challenges is the wasted opportunity: duplicated efforts, unstable support to entrepreneurs, especially those from marginalised groups, weaker claims for impact and less confidence from funders and governments. The systemic cost is slower sector maturation: without shared evidence, incubators remain localized problem-solvers instead of becoming contributors to a resilient, professionalized and a collective global ecosystem.
But why do these questions matter?
The answer is simple. Without solid evidence, good intentions can’t turn into scalable systems. That’s why this issue matters both in practice and for the system as a whole.
For incubators, unstable funding and fragmented measurement make it difficult to plan beyond the next grant cycle, to invest in staff and systems or to experiment with sustainable business models to strengthen their organisations. Short funding cycles discourage investment in governance, talent development, and robust monitoring systems. As a result, they remain reactive rather than strategic- chasing grants rather than building durable business models.
For funders, the consequence is missed learning and inefficient allocation of resources. Without comparable evidence, it is challenging to determine where catalytic capital can be deployed with the greatest effect or which modalities produce the most scale and equity. As a result, funders cannot easily distinguish between pilots that need scaling and pilots that should be rethought. Therefore, funders risk scaling pilots prematurely or backing approaches that appear promising anecdotally but fail to deliver in practice.
For entrepreneurs, the downstream effect is real, immediate, and personal: programs that start strong and then fold; mentorship that is intermittent; and access to networks that are uneven. Entrepreneurs, often the most vulnerable actors in the system, pay the highest price for ecosystem fragility.
This is where Pollinate Impact comes in, focusing on a practical, field-building intervention designed to shift incentives. It aims to provide incubators with the evidence they need to negotiate better funding terms, funders with the data they need to invest more strategically, and entrepreneurs with stable pathways to growth and resilience.
Why does this demand urgent action?
The threads converge into a single, urgent point. Without better evidence and better systems for learning, incubators will continue to operate in fragile ways that limit their impact. Members’ voices make the problem immediate and human, and now we’ll need the methods to translate those stories into signals that can change the way impact incubators operate.
We invite incubators, funders, and researchers to co-create a new standard for funding incubation research, one that reflects what’s truly needed on the ground.
In Part 2, we’ll outline how Pollinate Impact plans to transform these stories and inputs into concrete, member-led evidence building: the specific questions we’re asking, the methods we’re using, and how incubators, funders, and researchers can join this effort.
Stay tuned for my next article!
Himakshi Chaudhary is the Research Weaver at Pollinate Impact. Based in Delhi, she leads efforts to strengthen data and insights across the impact incubation field. She brings experience across research, sustainability, and development, combining analytical thinking with a storyteller’s instinct to turn insights into action. Outside work, she’s a trained Hindustani classical singer who finds joy in poetry and badminton.
