Building What Comes Next: Lessons from a Decade of Youth Ecosystem Building

Reflections on coordination, partnerships, and impact

Author: Fai Wechayachai

Why Ecosystem-Building Still Matters

Youth entrepreneurship in Asia and the Pacific has moved into the mainstream over the past decade. The vocabulary, the funding, and the policy attention have all expanded. However, the opportunity is not equitably available for all young people. The same country can produce radically different odds for two young people growing up at the same time. Privilege concentrates. Vulnerability concentrates. The distance between them has not closed at the speed suggested by the rhetoric.

I have worked with youth across the full spectrum.  For the past decade, I have worked across the regional entrepreneurship ecosystem, most recently with ANDE and GSG Impact, spanning contexts from grassroots community development to cross-cultural education and impact investing. Those vantage points still teach me different things about building markets in Asia. That is why ecosystem-building still matters.

What Has Changed Over the Past Decade

The biggest shift I have noticed is in how institutions talk about young people. Ten years ago, youth-related work mostly meant education: schools, scholarships, employability programmes, and study-abroad pipelines. Young people were treated either as beneficiaries to be supported or as problems to be solved. The language was rarely about agency.

That has genuinely changed. Programmes such as Youth Co:Lab helped reframe young people in the eyes of policymakers, donors, and corporate partners as entrepreneurs and solution-builders rather than recipients. The vocabulary of impact, ecosystems, and innovation now sits comfortably in policy documents that, a decade ago, would have framed the same young people as a target group.

Two other shifts have become prominent. First, technology has cracked open access. Exposure to global ideas, networks, and learning that used to be available only to those with privileged educational opportunities can now be accessed through a phone. That changes how young people see what is possible for themselves, even when their immediate options remain limited.

Second, the ecosystem itself is less fragmented than it was.  Ten years ago, building anything regional meant going to conference after conference to identify synergies, because there was no shared map of who was doing what. Today, you can find aligned partners faster, and the work has moved from breadth to depth.

What Has Not Changed Enough

The harder truth is that the structural gaps are roughly where they were. Outcomes for young people still track geography, class, gender, and proximity to networks. For most rural and low-income young people in our region, the moonshot is not launching a startup. It is staying in school, finding a stable income, or not having to migrate to find a job.

Policy is the constraint we keep dancing around. Much of the ecosystem progress in Southeast Asia has been driven by private capital, civil society organizations, and intermediaries doing what governments would not or could not do. That energy gets you a long way, but it does not get you to scale. Scale lives in the rules: how a business registers, how it accesses finance, what is taught in classrooms, what counts as a recognized qualification, and what visas exist for cross-border entrepreneurs. Without those rails, you build pilots, not systems.

Government engagement is genuinely a challenge here. It is politically sensitive, slow, and uneven across countries, and many ecosystem actors avoid it altogether. However, the markets that have invested in policy engagement, even cautiously, show a greater likelihood of scaling and have been the ones that have held onto their gains.

Myanmar is the clearest example, and the most painful one. The country went from having almost no startup ecosystem to hosting accelerators, early-stage funds, equity investors and a recognizable cohort of youth founders, all within a few years. The market was not too large, but the fact that ecosystem actors took ownership and contributed to ecosystem building was monumental.  When the political environment shifted, a great deal of that infrastructure was either lost, displaced, or pushed underground. Ecosystems are only as durable as the policy environment that holds them.

Ecosystem Coordination and Partnerships: Reducing Fragmented Gaps Without Over-Engineering

Coordination has become more visible over the last ten years, and also more crowded. Every funder, every multilateral, every accelerator now has a partnership strategy. The result is that there are more meetings and memoranda of understanding than joint outcomes. Collaboration sometimes ends up costing more than it returns, particularly for the smaller organizations expected to attend everything, know and collaborate with everyone.

The honest question is which forms of collaboration actually reduce fragmentation, and which ones simply add another layer of process on top of an already overstretched ecosystem.

The Ecosystem Builder's Role Today

I describe what I do as ecosystem-building because most of my work is not running a project. It is about connecting people, reframing conversations, and achieving shared outcomes with all multi-stakeholder partners. It is trying to shape an impact economy that integrates social, environmental, and economic outcomes rather than treating them as trade-offs.

When I started working on impact more than a decade ago, the conversation was largely about impact investment, with long debates about whether financial returns and social returns could share a balance sheet. That framing was useful at the time, but it was missing an important piece. It centred capital and investors, and it left out most of the people who actually create or experience impact.

The conversation has widened since. Impact is no longer mainly about where money goes. It is about what is being built and who actually benefits. That means bringing entrepreneurs, intermediaries, educators, communities, and policymakers into the same conversations as investors, and treating impact as an economy-wide question rather than a product category. It also means making sure the people usually missing from those conversations, including young people themselves, marginalized communities, and Indigenous groups, are at the table and not only on the agenda.

If there is one thing I would carry forward from a decade of this work, it is that ecosystem-building is not about being everywhere. It is about going deeper with partners who share your values and elevating what already works, rather than constantly starting new things.

What the Next Decade Demands

The shift I think we most need is a mental one: thinking beyond borders.

 Geopolitics is pushing countries inwards, funding is becoming more domestic, and national narratives are tightening. Ecosystems risk becoming boxed in by what is currently possible inside their own borders, even though the challenges young people face, from climate change to displacement to inequality, all transcend them.

 This is about mindset. The ecosystems that learn across regions, share what works, and let young people build with peers in other countries will produce stronger outcomes than those that do not.

That is also why neutral, long-term platforms like Youth Co:Lab still matter. Real systems change does not happen in twelve-month grant cycles. It needs ten years or more of relationships, alignment, and patience. When that work is done well, it produces young people who do more than fit into existing economies. They reshape them.

The work ahead is not easier than the work behind. But it is clearer. Young people are not the problem in our region. They are the builders. The job over the next decade is to ensure the ecosystems around them are strong, inclusive, and durable enough to enable young people's agency.

About the Author

Fai Wechayachai is Head of Region for Asia at GSG Impact, where she works to strengthen impact and entrepreneurship ecosystems across the region. Previously Regional Chapter Head of ANDE East and Southeast Asia, she brings over a decade of experience spanning international development, education, and cross-sector ecosystem building across Asia and beyond.