Why well-evaluated impact projects still fail
2026 Geneva Forum - Speaker Short Feature
A contribution by Patrick Schmucki, published ahead of his intervention in the Impact Finance – Philanthropy, Investment and Blended Finance session of the 2026 Geneva Forum.
Mots clefs :
Impact Investing · Impact Assessment · System Vitality · Systems Thinking · Adaptive Capacity · Philanthropy
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Authorship:
– Patrick Schmucki, Resilion GmbH
At the Geneva Forum 2026, Resilion founder Patrick Schmucki will propose that impact investors and philanthropists screen the environment a project depends on before they score the project.
| Funders using AGILE score a project on five families: Alignment, Governance, Intention, Leadership and Efficiency. The scores show how well a project is built and run. They say much less about whether it will still deliver impact in five years. |
That depends on conditions outside the project: the market it sells into, the supply chain it draws on, the regulation it works under, and other funders. When those conditions erode, even the best-scored project struggles.
Schmucki calls the missing measure “system vitality”: whether the environment a project operates in can still change when the conditions it depends on change.
It also tests the theory of change. AGILE’s Intention family asks whether impact is the core of a project and how much it claims. That claim, and the KPIs that track it, assume a linear chain of cause and effect, which is unrealistic: system change runs through feedback loops, delays and tipping points. Where vitality is low, durable change is unlikely from the start, and the KPIs disguise it.
The banana trade shows what low vitality looks like. In the 1950s exports ran on a single variety, the Gros Michel, until a soil fungus ended it. The trade replaced it with another single variety: Cavendish now supplies about 99% of banana exports and is susceptible to Tropical Race 4, a strain of the same disease. A project in that trade can score well on all five AGILE families and still carry this risk.
Funders can produce the same pattern themselves. AGILE rewards scaling up under Efficiency. As a solution grows, processes are standardised, supply chains tightened, and capital, suppliers and skills reorganise around the winning model until it displaces the alternatives. When many funders back the same winner, the environment becomes more efficient and less resilient.
His proposal is a structural conditions screen, applied to a project’s environment before the five families are scored. Alignment already asks whether a p
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