Harvard Kennedy School report features GDI’s research on multi-stakeholder initiatives

Two years after publishing our landmark report, More than the Sum of its Parts: Making Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives Work, we’re thrilled to see our research and insights continuing to influence how effective collective action plays out in practice – this time, in the areas of smallholder finance and climate change.

A new report titled “The role of Multi-stakeholder Initiatives in promoting the resilience of smallholder agriculture to climate change in Africa,” explores specifically how leading organizations are using multi-stakeholder solutions to tackle complex, system-wide development problems at the intersection of climate change and smallholder finance.

The report – published by a group including representatives from the Harvard Kennedy School Corporate Sustainability Initiative, Dalberg Research, The Mastercard Foundation, and TechnoServe – draws on insights from More than the Sum of its Parts as well as advisory support from GDI’s Executive Director Andrew Stern. It features several leading organizations to show what agricultural finance-oriented multi-stakeholder initiatives look like in practice, including two GDI-incubated initiatives: the Mastercard Foundation RAF Learning Lab (the Lab) and Initiative for Smallholder Finance (ISF).

Bringing the right actors across sectors together to spark systems-level change can be hard. We’re both excited and inspired to see partnerships emerging in smallholder finance and climate change that are going beyond business as usual to solve the world’s toughest challenges of today, and look forward to seeing how other problem solvers can learn from them in turn.