As 2025 came to an end, I found myself sitting with a few reflections I hadn’t managed to write down at the time. Coming back to work this week gave me the space to articulate some of those thoughts more clearly. This piece captures what I’m increasingly observing in the global development landscape and how I’m making sense of it.
One of the tensions that feels increasingly visible is around value-based leadership. We hear the right language more than ever: ethics, integrity, inclusion, impact. But when it comes to implementation, leadership rarely plays out in clean, binary choices. It operates in a grey space, shaped by funding constraints, power dynamics, political pressures, institutional incentives, and lived realities.
In that space, values are tested. Do values trump everything else? Or do they become something we reference, but quietly compromise when the trade-offs become uncomfortable? And perhaps the harder question: how do you lead well when every option carries cost, and no decision feels fully aligned with what you believe is right?
A second reflection is around inequality. Not as a new phenomenon, but as one that is shifting shape. Living in South Africa, inequality is an everyday reality. But what we’re increasingly seeing globally is inequality moving decisively into the middle-income space. Middle-income households are struggling to afford housing, education, healthcare, and long-term stability.
This reframes the challenge. It’s no longer only about providing “affordable” options. It’s about access.
Access to better services.
Access to employment and economic mobility.
Access to systems that actually work for people where they are.
And this question of access extends well beyond digital solutions. It forces us to look more critically at how our broader social, economic, and institutional systems are designed. Who they serve, and who they unintentionally exclude.
The third reflection is about systems themselves. Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha are inheriting structures largely designed in a very different era, many rooted in post–World War II thinking. Political systems, economic models, and governance frameworks that once made sense are now under strain. We see this tension play out repeatedly. Systems that struggle to listen to needs on the ground, decision-making that feels disconnected from lived experience, and priorities that don’t always align with what people are actually feeling or facing.
So the question that keeps coming up for me is this:
What do new systems look like that genuinely give voice to people?
And how do we responsibly evolve what we’ve inherited, rather than simply defending it or tearing it down?
These aren’t conclusions. Just observations that feel harder to ignore as 2026 unfolds.
Aliasgher Janmohammed 