The Impact Equation

For the 100th episode of The Impact Equation, we’re joined by Paul Ronalds, CEO of Save the Children Global Ventures, to explore how venture capital, technology and innovative finance can scale solutions for children around the world. The episode closes our special series profiling three of its investments: Amparo, fitting prosthetic limbs in a single visit; PrimaKu, reaching 3 million+ parents across Indonesia; and reach52, bringing healthcare and medicines to underserved communities.We finish where we started the series: How do you find, fund and scale ideas that can change millions of lives?

In this episode, we sit down with Sam Staincliffe (Uplift360), Nicolas Brien (Wastetide), and Elisabeth Bröring (MWT GmbH & Co. KG) for a deep dive into the practical realities of the circular economy. While they approach the challenge from different angles—using AI, processing technology, and downstream applications—our guests share a singular mission: shifting the perception of "waste" into the reality of valuable secondary materials.

Michael Young is co-founder and co-CEO of Lindus Health, an AI-native contract research organisation that runs clinical trials end-to-end and has begun licensing therapeutics to take through trials itself. A former special adviser in the Home Office and 10 Downing Street, where he worked on the UK Life Sciences Strategy, Michael joined Adam and Rafi to explain why running trials, not discovering drugs, has become the biggest bottleneck in medicine. He unpicks the incentives that keep contract research slow and expensive, reflects on Kate Bingham and the Vaccine Taskforce, describes how Lindus can now run five drug programmes for the cost of one a decade ago, and looks ahead to a wave of AI-discovered drug candidates the current system cannot absorb. He closes with a practical ask of every listener: sign up for a clinical trial.

Maia Ramarosandratana is the Founder of Projet Jeune Leader, an organisation she launched in 2013 and has since built into one of the most ambitious efforts to drive to deliver comprehensive sex education through public schools in Madagascar. Maia has led PJL from an early initiative to a scale model now serving more than 50,000 students each year. Maia has scaled while insisting on programme quality, investing in rigorous monitoring and evaluation, building partnerships with government, including the Ministry of Education, and expanding both budget and reach tenfold. Shantanu is a Mulago Fellow and this interview is the third in a series of three episodes with our friends at the Mulago Foundation https://www.mulagofoundation.org.

Mary Long-Dhonau OBE has spent more than 25 years helping people prepare for one of the UK's fastest-growing climate risks. Known across the country as Flood Mary, she became an advocate after her own family home flooded repeatedly with contaminated sewage. Faced with little practical support and caring for a young son with severe autism, she turned that experience into a mission to help others recover more quickly and prepare more effectively. In this episode of The Impact Equation, Mary explains why flooding is no longer something that only affects communities beside rivers. As our climate changes, surface water flooding is becoming an increasing threat, and she argues that homeowners, businesses and policymakers all need to rethink what resilience looks like.