Critical minerals, AI, and nature: Where the Soros fund is investing next

Global development finance is facing the realities of a decline in foreign aid, a trend accelerated by recent geopolitical shocks and shifting administrative priorities in the global north. For impact investors, this moment demands a reality check: Private capital cannot fill the hole left by public dollars. That’s the view of Lily Han, head of policy and innovative finance at the Soros Economic Development Fund, or SEDF. Devex caught up with her to discuss how the fund is navigating this precarious landscape, why the sector needs to prioritize collaboration over “sexy” innovation, and where SEDF is placing its bets for 2026 — from critical minerals in Africa to the intersection of artificial intelligence and independent media. This conversation has been condensed and edited. Given the current precarious moment and the decline in foreign aid, how do you situate the role of impact investors right now? It’s obviously been a particularly difficult year, given the huge shock to the system. However, I would say that the decline of foreign aid — at least from global north sources — has been many years in the making. It’s not just something that suddenly came by surprise, and we were caught completely unaware. Impact investors certainly cannot fill the entire hole from an aid or investment perspective. Given all of this, it just means the urgency is greater than ever to stretch all of our dollars further. This means using our capital in a very strategic and targeted way that can try to unlock the greatest amounts of private commercial capital, domestic government resources, or make the shrinking amount of public sector development or climate finance dollars go much further. The good news is impact investors are very good at, and indeed designed to play, this catalytic role: identifying specific market failures and bottlenecks, ideating and testing effective solutions, and then really intentionally trying to get other sources to come in for scale and replication. What would better coordination between public dollars and private impact investing look like? I think it is, from an impact investor’s perspective, looking around at where the specific bottlenecks are. Are there existing solutions that just need to be scaled? For instance, impact investors or private philanthropy could pool their own money and bring that greater pool of capital to bear to further encourage all of the public money available in very well-designed blended structures. This is instead of the current MO [mode of operation], which has always been that every philanthropy or impact investor pursues its own niche initiative, tries to come up with something totally innovative, and has its name on it for its own sake. Instead, we should look around at what simple things we know work — like guarantees or very simple blended instruments — and just actually pool our capital into this. Maybe it’s not super sexy or innovative, or maybe somebody else’s name is already on this instrument, but if it works, we should do it. Looking ahead to the next few years, where is the Soros Economic Development Fund most likely to invest, both geographically and topically? Our current three investment strategies are climate, independent media, and reproductive health and rights. Starting in 2026, we have a couple of new themes that we want to start moving into. We’d like to do more in critical minerals in Africa. That is in part because our grantmaking colleagues have also recently launched a new program focused on critical minerals in Africa, and we think there are a lot of complementarities. In the media and technology space, we will continue doing global and U.S. media investing, but we would also like to add more technology investments into that mix. By technology, I mean “responsible technology” — things focused on big tech in the global north that can put guardrails and assurances around how it is being deployed, as well as traditional “tech for good,” like using AI and technologies for health, education, or workforce development. Do you think the challenges regarding media and tech are different in low-income countries? Yes, definitely. In our media portfolio, our biggest asset is the Media Development Investment Fund, which invests in global independent media all over the global south. In some ways, they are trying to help those businesses navigate not just typical issues like preventing oligarchic capture, but also thinking through how to embrace new audiences, go digital, and interact with social media. In some cases, there is the opportunity for leapfrogging because those societies are sometimes younger, more digitally savvy, and connected, and don’t have traditional ties to print journalism models. We are hoping that with some of our investments, we can also help to support local innovation — small language models and designing news products in local languages. That is a big gap to be filled, and technology can actually enable and accelerate a lot of these things. Following COP30, there was a lot of discussion about financing adaptation. How are you identifying bankable nature-based solutions? OSF is first and foremost a rights and justice-focused philanthropy. For us, we’re not necessarily in it for the nature and climate impact per se, but because of the impact of climate change and deforestation on people and political systems. One of the reasons that we are investing is actually to counter the political narrative that deforestation and destruction of natural resources are required for economic growth. We picked three areas to focus our portfolio: the bioeconomy, agricultural supply chains, and reforestation. The bioeconomy is about creating markets for products that come from the forest — like acai, coffee, cacao, and pharmaceuticals — and channeling that economic value to the Indigenous communities that have been the traditional stewards. Agricultural supply chains are such a major driver of deforestation. We need to start changing farming practices, not just by hoping people understand it’s bad, but using hard financial and legal incentives. We are looking for opportunities where we can offer below-market financing that requires agreeing to change certain farming practices. And while reforestation has a little less direct impact on people, we wanted to get involved to learn about the intersection with carbon markets and the monetization of carbon credits as a key revenue stream.