Latent, Not Lost
How existing assets become market positions
Hard power, deployed through money and mandate, is no longer enough to solve the world’s most challenging problems. Health, education, climate, financial inequality, and justice remain the largest underserved market opportunities of our time. Institutional players are retreating. Building a market position in these spaces means drawing on the capital, talent, and soft power that already exist in proximity to the problem. This edition sets out what those latent assets are and a simple sequence for structuring access to them.
Capital Without Architecture
Around five trillion US dollars in remittances have moved over the last decade. Most of this money went directly into households rather than into formal aid systems. Today, tens of thousands of former international development practitioners sit outside formal institutions with no structure to use what they know. The money to work on hard problems exists. The architecture to connect that capital to solutions does not yet exist at scale.
The assets closest to hard problems sit inside this gap. Diaspora capital already flows into households, communities, and small enterprises at a scale that often exceeds official development assistance. Operational knowledge has been built over careers in some of the most difficult environments on earth. Community delivery infrastructure already reaches the last mile at unit costs formal institutions have struggled to match. Cultural credibility and trusted relationships were built over decades and do not transfer easily to new entrants.
The old development architecture bypassed most of these assets. Centralised, grant‑based models favoured capital that could be tracked through institutional ledgers and reported against log‑frames. Assets that were relational, informal, or embedded in communities did not fit that reporting structure, so they sat outside it. When key parts of that architecture were dismantled, the assets remained in place, largely unused by formal systems and available for new operating models. A study of these soft power assets is what underpins the Soft Power Index, which tracks organisations already building on them.
The Common Land
In 18th‑century England, control of common land changed hands. Communities had used it informally for grazing, farming, and basic sustenance. The land was productive; the inputs were there. What changed was the architecture: legal instruments, property rights, and capital structures that organised scattered common plots into enclosed, privately held productive units.
The people who understood this logic early built the agricultural and industrial markets that defined the next century. Large estate owners and early industrialists consolidated land, increased yields, and created the production base that industrial cities and global markets later built on. Those who continued treating common land as informal and unstructured lost access to it altogether. The model was zero‑sum: value was created and captured by the few, with control shifting away from the communities that had used the land.
There is a parallel to the current moment, although the logic can now be applied differently. Diaspora capital, institutional knowledge, and community delivery infrastructure are the common land of the hard problem space today. They are productive, present, and already used informally. The missing piece is the architecture that can turn them into clear outcome units and contractable positions. The first movers who build that architecture will hold market positions that compound; the question is who those positions are built with and for.
M‑KOPA shows how this can be done with a positive‑sum orientation. Hundreds of millions of people across sub‑Saharan Africa had no formal credit history but did have real repayment capacity and purchasing power. That latent asset sat outside formal finance. M‑KOPA built the architecture – PAYGo rails, behavioural data, and mobile money – that turned this into a contractable credit position. Millions of customers and billions in extended credit later, the position compounds with every repayment, and the underlying communities gain access to assets they could not previously finance. It is positive‑sum because the development gains come from millions of people entering and using the formal financial system.
The pattern holds across health, education, climate, and other hard problem spaces: find the latent assets, build the architecture, hold the market position – but in this case, value is created, captured, and distributed in ways that support positive‑sum growth.
What Latent Means
Latent assets are capital, capability, and trust that already exist close to hard problems but have not been structured for deployment at scale. They are under‑used, labelled as informal, or bypassed by institutional models that needed centralised control to function.
Six categories define the latent asset landscape in 2026:
Diaspora remittances and investment capital. Africa’s annual remittances are now around US$100 billion, exceeding official development assistance in many receiving countries. The Commonwealth diaspora carries an estimated annual investment potential of US$73.2 billion. These flows move on family and community ties and do not depend on donor budget cycles.
Institutional knowledge networks. When USAID ceased operations in July 2025, the systems and budgets changed. The knowledge did not. People who built community health systems, land formalisation programmes, agricultural finance models, and legal empowerment networks still hold presence, credibility, and a field‑level understanding of what works.
Community delivery infrastructure. Community health workers organised under the DESC model (Digitally‑enabled, Equipped, Supervised, and Compensated), along with paralegal networks, farmer cooperatives, and community facilitators, already deliver services at low unit cost and at scale. The infrastructure exists. The missing element is an outcome contract that makes it financially sustainable.
Digital payment rails. India’s UPI processed 16.6 billion transactions in February 2026, around US$274 billion in value. Brazil’s Pix now processes more daily transactions than credit and debit cards combined in Brazil. These rails make it possible to route diaspora capital through outcome contracts, turning a household transfer into a verifiable development investment.
Trust and cultural legitimacy. Trust is built slowly, lost quickly, and does not move easily between actors. A later entrant cannot buy or compress the time needed to build it. It is the factor that keeps a position in place when other conditions change.
Blended finance instruments. As of April 2025, 259 impact bonds were active across 40 countries, including 19 development impact bonds in low‑ and middle‑income countries. The contracting infrastructure to pay for verified outcomes already exists.
From Latent to Structured
In practice, structuring access to these assets means three things: defining a clear outcome unit that can be priced, choosing the local operators and rails that already reach households, users, or beneficiaries, and building contracts that align returns to capital with better outcomes for communities, while ensuring users are not left worse off. The details differ by sector, but the sequence does not. The organisations in the Soft Power Index are currently working this way, turning latent assets into positions that hold in health, education, climate, and finance.
Latent, and Leveraged
Taken together, these categories show that the main inputs for solving hard problems are already in the system. Capital is moving, often at household level. Talent and operational knowledge sit with people who have worked inside the problem for years. Community infrastructure and trusted relationships reach the last mile. What is missing is the architecture that can organise these latent assets into clear outcome units, contract against them, and run them at scale. The next market positions in hard problems will be built by leaders who treat these assets as their starting point, not as features of an external system.
Sources and References
Migration Policy Institute, “Global Remittances Guide,” July 2024.
UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, “The Transformative Power of Digital Remittances in Africa,” August 2024.
World Bank Data, “Personal remittances, received (current US$),” including regional data for Sub‑Saharan Africa, accessed 2024–2025.
CitiNewsroom / MyJoyOnline, “Remittances received in Ghana last year was $4.7bn – Taptap Send Director,” February 2023; GNBCC / MyJoyOnline coverage of Ghana remittances in 2023; and World Bank remittance data for Ghana.
Commonwealth Secretariat, “African diaspora investment spotlighted at Commonwealth roundtable,” May 2026.
IMF, Finance & Development, “Remittances: Funds for the Folks Back Home,” and related “Back to Basics” materials on remittance use.
Brookings Institution / Education Outcomes Fund, “Impact Bonds Snapshot – April 2025,” global database of social and development impact bonds.
National Payments Corporation of India and associated market reporting on UPI transaction volumes and values, February 2026.
EBANX, “Five years on, Brazil’s Pix approaches 8 billion monthly transactions,” November 2025, and related analysis of Pix user penetration.
The Straits Times, reporting on the India–Trinidad and Tobago agreement to develop a UPI‑style payments system, October 2024.
Public announcements and central bank communications on adoption of UPI‑like real‑time payments infrastructure in Namibia, 2024–2025.
Living Goods and evaluation partners, randomised controlled trial evidence on community health worker impact and cost per capita, as summarised by The Life You Can Save and similar evaluators.
BBC News, reporting on the closure of USAID and associated institutional changes, July 2025.