Investing in Partnerships: Catalyzing Action for Sustainable Development

Adapted from remarks given by Heather Grady , RPA Vice President, Collaboratives during the ECOSOC Partnership Forum Session on Investing in Partnerships: Catalyzing Action for Sustainable Development Goal 17 at the UN Headquarters in New York on February 5, 2025.

Positive, systemic change relies on enduring partnerships, and for grantee partners, diversified funding partners. The ECOSOC Partnership Forum is designed with this in mind. Click here and here for additional resources.

Since our founding in 2002, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) has collaborated with hundreds of philanthropists and foundations worldwide.

Our Shifting Systems Initiative, launched in 2016, has given us a deep understanding of the importance of cross-sectoral partnerships and illustrated how to leverage innovative financing to drive local and global impact.

Below are five examples of promising, innovative financing mechanisms that advance multi-stakeholder partnerships and offer scalable solutions for broader impact on any of the Sustainable Development Goals.

1. La Caixa Foundation of Spain: Work for Progress Program

Traditionally focused on grantmaking across fields, Fundación ”la Caixa” piloted impact investing tools including loan guarantees, soft loans, and technical assistance in 2024. Together with local intermediaries in Mozambique and Perú, they enhanced their Work for Progress (W4P) program. This initiative creates employment opportunities for women and youth in deeply disadvantaged communities and is based on the first principle of a systems approach — deep listening to communities.

The program has helped seed a variety of small business pilots in these two countries and later in India, creating over 40,000 jobs. W4P works by incubating small businesses with job-creating prototypes and then layers in support for local cooperatives, aggregators, and larger initiatives like ecotourism. One successful small business example is an e-rickshaw company in India that is driven by and for women to enable safe transportation.

All of these pilots were designed bottom-up, based on the needs of the local communities. Once they get off the ground, scaling comes from an impact fund that provides soft loans and first-loss guarantees that allow local financial institutions to take more risks and work with smaller businesses.?This layered, systemic approach means going beyond grantmaking to unlock more than grant capital and enable scaled impact.

2. African Funds of Funds: Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund, Ci-Gaba, and Oryx Impact

Support is growing for African Funds of Funds that assist emerging African fund managers in accessing investment to serve local medium and small enterprises. Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund , the Ghana-based Ci-Gaba Fund, supported by both the Global Steering Group on Impact Investing and Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship , and Oryx Impact are some of the organizations leading the charge, focusing on a growing number of creditworthy local fund managers.

An Africa-based Fund of Funds addresses a longstanding and fundamental challenge—organizations from the Global North invest in large, low-risk projects, but leave a gap of smaller and/or somewhat higher-risk projects with significant rewards.

African fund managers are on the ground, can gauge risk better, and know where and how to create impact—but they rarely get funding from the multilateral development banks. Creating funds to support these managers is a way to shift power and give more authority to local actors.

3. Climate Champions: Task Force on Credit Enhancement for Nature-/Climate-linked Sovereign Financing

High-Level Climate Champions takes a different approach to address the shortage of government finance and the weak connections between climate project developers (entrepreneurs, governments), financiers (development banks, commercial banks), and technical capacity providers, who often struggle to find each other, making it harder to fund and implement regional climate solutions.

Working in close partnership with the UNFCCC and drawing on philanthropic funding and the support of their fiduciary host RPA, the organization launched the Task Force on Credit Enhancement for Nature-/Climate-linked Sovereign Financing to enable the scaling of financial instruments for climate and nature objectives in emerging markets and developing economies.

This initiative brings together key multilateral development banks (MDBs), other Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), Multilateral Climate Funds (MCFs), international organizations, and the private sector to increase the efficiency, affordability, accessibility, and scalability of financial instruments like debt for nature swaps (e.g. El Salvador, Belize) and sustainability-linked bonds.

4. Climate Champions: 2030 Climate Solutions

Climate Champions’ 2030 Climate Solutions platform helps drive systemic climate action by guiding its 600+ non-state global partners, which include sector-specific alliances and membership initiatives. These groups, in turn, convene 20-50 organizations each, creating a powerful multiplier effect around systemic action on climate.

The organization curates investable climate projects and presents them to regional and global financiers to help project developers secure funding. These projects are also shared with governments as case studies, showcasing both the successes and the financial challenges developers face.

5. Mayors Migration Council: Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees

RPA project Mayors Migration Council (MMC)—supported by the IKEA Foundation , Robert Bosch Stiftung and others—channels resources to city governments often overlooked by traditional donors through their Global Cities Fund for Migrants and Refugees (GCF).

The fund enables mayors to address the urgent needs of migrant, displaced, and marginalized receiving communities while building a case for further investment. Through GCF investments, cities can design their projects, ensure the inclusion of migrants and refugees, and partner with global public, private, and social sector organizations to amplify impact.

In this way, cities have demonstrated the capacity to implement innovative funding models, overcome funding barriers to support migrants and refugees, and enact equity and inclusion in financing local projects.

Freetown, Sierra Leone used its GCF grant to create a waste management program that loans tricycles to micro-enterprises run by rural migrant youth. These thriving enterprises repay the loans, which the city then uses to establish additional youth enterprises and expand the project’s impact. Freetown has secured over $1 million in funding from a multilateral development bank to expand the project.

Larger financing mechanisms and concessional loan windows tend to focus on infrastructure development without considering equity and inclusion. Larger investors can scale equitable impact by including stipulations around equitable access to larger-scale projects and featuring social infrastructure components such as livelihood programs and access to healthcare and education.

Closing Thoughts

These innovative financing models—spanning livelihoods, climate action, and migration—can be applied across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

It’s a matter of public finance leveraging the higher risk appetite and nimbleness of philanthropic investment, and philanthropy living up to its promise of being the risk-taking partner in the equation.

As evident in each of these examples, collaboration across sectors is key to creating the conditions for long-term, scalable impact.