From Global Capital to Local Impact: What Solve’s Funding Data Reveals

Eighty-five million dollars. That’s how much Solve has mobilized for social impact entrepreneurs over the past decade through prizes and partnerships.

You may be wondering where that money comes from and where exactly it goes. To answer this, we analyzed completed transfers from funders to entrepreneurs, excluding in-kind partnerships, zero monetary value relationships, and committed-but-unpaid funding, then mapped each funder's location.

From this, we found the following breakdown of funder locations across 17 countries, concentrated in high-income Western economies.

This reflects the reality of global philanthropy: wealthy economies provide the bulk of private funding (though official government assistance remains the larger share of global aid). It also reflects Solve’s positionality as a US-based funder, as well as the relationships held by Solve’s founders and the funding network that was built out as a result.

Solve-facilitated funding has reached innovators based in over 70 countries. Eighty-six percent of all funding has flowed to innovators headquartered in the top 15 countries. This reflects a concentration of resources to particular geographies, though these countries are well-distributed globally and regionally.

That said, cutting the data like this can be misleading. For some countries, such as the US, we’ve catalyzed significant funding partly because 40% of our innovators are US-based.  

A more revealing analysis could be to consider the average funding per exchange by headquarters country. When we look at the data this way, the geographic picture changes significantly. The largest per-exchange amounts aren’t clustering in the expected places like the United States, Nigeria, and India (large countries from which we’ve selected many innovators); they’re surfacing in new and unexpected locations where breakthrough innovators got big checks.

A persistent critique of Global North to Global South aid is that the Global North exports priorities along with dollars, and organizations headquartered far from the problem end up shaping how it gets solved. 

For a model like Solve’s, these dynamics shift. We intentionally select proximate entrepreneurs, people who don’t just study a problem, but live it. Fifty-eight percent of Solvers selected in 2025 have personal experience with the challenges they’re working to solve. Wherever the funding originates, it is backing visions of the future that are deeply rooted in lived experience and local knowledge. 

The capital may travel from north to south, but the ideas, and the authority over them, belong to the people closest to the work.