Beyond GDP: How Do We Drive Shared Prosperity at Scale in a Context of Crisis and Constraint?

SDGs
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Q3:

Shared prosperity at scale requires partnerships that combine the strengths of each sector. Businesses can provide investment, expertise and innovation; governments can create the policy conditions that enable inclusive growth; investors can support long-term value creation; and charities and community organisations can bring deep local knowledge and trusted relationships.

CAF’s Corporate Giving Report 2025 highlights the importance of strategic, long-term community investment, while the World Giving Report 2026 underscores the role of social connection, trust and civic participation in building stronger societies. Together, these findings suggest that the most effective partnerships are those that move beyond transactional funding towards shared goals, mutual accountability and co-designed solutions.

In practice, that means businesses, governments, investors, civil society and communities working together to expand opportunity, strengthen local institutions and build resilience. Shared prosperity is most likely to emerge when communities are not simply beneficiaries of change, but active partners in shaping it.

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Q 3. As mentioned above in Q1&2, these partnerships can create a virtuous cycle in which businesses grow through inclusive markets, shared income, farmers earn more stable incomes, consumers gain access to healthier and more diverse diets, and communities become more resilient to economic and climate-related shocks. This is the foundation of shared prosperity—economic growth that is inclusive, sustainable, and translates into improved well-being and opportunities for all.

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A3: Short answer is balanced ones where everyone benefits and none of the partners is disproportionately advantaged. Also ones where everyone plays to their strengths and doesn’t assume that one party takes the majority risk. I have seen partnership proposals where supposed impact investors expected business to borrow money from them, finance the (NGOs delivering the) societal benefit and pay them back before the business saw any benefit themselves; while government saw it as their role just to bless the initiative and by so doing claim equal credit for it.

A more attractive model (for agribusiness) is that the business provides a farming community with guaranteed offtake at a premium price and technical assistance to enhance productivity. Investors provide governments with sovereign funds to support agreed societal programmes in the farming communities (and potentially to derisk against price fluctuations). The societal programmes are implemented, checked and reported by independent civil society / academia. Government provides blended funding to the programmes but also levels the playing field with appropriate regulation to encourage other private sector actors and investors to replicate / scale up.

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New type of partnership: organizations should partner with the families! We should involve every poor family in its own development. We should ask them about their priorities, and they should build their own potential and contribute to their own pathway out of poverty.

In our work, we won one more actor: private companies using the Stoplight/Compass inside their own value chains — suppliers, cooperatives, employees — to diagnose multidimensional poverty and co-design solutions with those families, instead of generic CSR programs.

Development at the community level is not enough. We should go deeper and work with families. The Poverty Stoplight has been replicated in 59 countries through more than 50 implementing partners, using an open licensing model: local NGOs and governments adapt it to their own context rather than a standardized solution being imposed .

And government partnerships remain essential to translate this into public polic y.

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Q3: No single actor has all the answers. I’ve learned that shared prosperity is rarely created by economic growth alone. It is created when different actors deliberately work together to ensure that growth translates into healthier people, more resilient communities, and greater opportunities for those who are often left behind. One lesson from participatory radio was that communities are not passive beneficiaries—they’re partners. When local voices shape programmes from the beginning, adoption and sustainability improve significantly. Shared prosperity happens when partnerships move from consultation to genuine co-creation.

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Q3. No single organization can create shared prosperity on its own. It requires partnerships built on trust, shared goals, and a willingness to learn from one another. Businesses, governments, investors, civil society, and communities each bring unique strengths, and the greatest impact comes when those strengths are aligned around measurable outcomes.

At Poverty Stoplight (povertystoplight.org), we’ve found that lasting change happens when communities are active participants, not just beneficiaries. When every stakeholder has a voice and a shared commitment to action, it’s possible to create solutions that are both scalable and sustainable.

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More early-stage (wholesale) fund of funds are needed that focus on supporting emerging & first time fund managers based in low and middle income countries. One example of this model is Ci Gaba as per this initial learnings report: https://impactinvestinggh.org/publications/unlocking-domestic-pension-capital-in-africa-for-smes/

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Q3 Storytelling and Identity-Building

  • Ubuntu is a narrative as much as it is a practice. To galvanize a demographic, you must appeal to their identity.

  • Campaign: Launch platforms that highlight “everyday Ubuntu (Botho) heroes – e.g. young rural guys solving local problems using local resources.

  • Objective: Shift the narrative from “I need a job” to “I am building my community”. This shifts the psychological focus from dependency to self-actualization.

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If the beyond GDP agenda challenges us to rethink what success looks like, then shared prosperity is one answer. It means creating economies that generate not only wealth, but opportunity, resilience and wellbeing. From Plan International’s perspective, that requires intentional partnerships between business, government, investors, civil society and communities, with girls and young people at the centre. No single sector can deliver shared prosperity alone, businesses bring reach, innovation, investment, government bring regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, public service and funds, investors can incentivize long-term value creation and NGO’s / civil society can add deep community relationships, trust and knowledge, expertise on rights, inclusion and safeguarding. Key to all of this is making sure the communities themselves are viewed as partner and co-creators, not simply beneficiaries. Because prosperity is truly shared only when everyone has the opportunity to benefit from it and contribute to it.

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Q3: No single sector can address today’s super-crisis alone. We need partnerships that align policy, capital, technology, and lived community experience around targeted outcomes. Vaccine alliances that united pharmaceutical companies, governments, foundations, and frontline health workers demonstrated what coordinated action can achieve under pressure. We need that same model applied to climate adaptation, digital inclusion, and economic resilience. Governments to create enabling regulatory frameworks. Investors to direct capital toward future-forward infrastructure. Civil society to be at the table to ensure trust and local relevance. The conversation has shifted from whether we collaborate to how fast we can do it well. Shared prosperity at scale will only happen when every stakeholder values that a win must be a win for all.

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One of the techniques I used to use at the beginning of Public Private Partnerships was the concept of “Drivers of Success” and asking prospective partners to be explicit about both what they bring for success and what they need for success.

Too often partners are NOT explicit enough about their needs and are often too modest about the capabilities that they can bring to a programme. Successful partnerships really are driven through joint teamwork and not simply someone providing the funds and high level support while others do the work on the ground.

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Business should move beyond Corporate Social Responsibility toward creating shared value. That means asking not only ‘How can communities support our business?’ but also ‘How can our business strengthen communities?’ Those two objectives are increasingly inseparable.

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Shared prosperity happens when different partners come together around a shared challenge, with each contributing their strengths. No single organisation can do it alone.

A good example is the Senator Keg Lager initiative in Kenya. After the tragic loss of lives from the consumption of illicit alcohol, the Government of Kenya and East African Breweries came together to find a long-term solution. The government created an enabling policy by zero rating the excise duty on beer made from locally grown sorghum and cassava. This made it possible for EABL to produce an affordable, safe alternative while creating demand for crops grown by smallholder farmers.

Many of these farmers came from Kenya’s arid and semi arid regions, where there had traditionally been few reliable cash crops. Through partnerships with agricultural organisations, farmers received training and support to improve production, while financial institutions helped many access the financing they needed to grow their businesses.

The result was far bigger than a successful beer brand. It addressed a public health challenge, created new livelihoods for thousands of farmers, strengthened local agriculture and built a resilient local supply chain. That’s what shared prosperity looks like. When every partner brings their strengths to a common purpose, the impact is much greater than any one organisation could achieve on its own.

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Q1: Shared prosperity is not simply about increasing the amount of wealth created. It is about widening people’s ability to participate in creating value, influence the decisions affecting them, retain a fair share of that value and build greater economic stability.

Economic growth can rise while local suppliers remain overlooked, young people remain unprepared for available opportunities and communities remain dependent on short-term projects. In that case, growth exists, but prosperity remains concentrated and unstable.

Across my experience in international cooperation, education and cross-cultural environments, I have repeatedly seen that talent and demand alone do not create opportunity. Value can remain invisible when people lack access, trust, market understanding or the ability to present what they offer in ways another market can recognise and use.

This is not only a matter of official regulation. Relationships between buyers and suppliers, employers and workers, owners and communities, together with access to information and finance, influence who can participate and compete. When these market relationships are weak, formally open markets can still become concentrated or exclusionary.

Income remains necessary, but it is incomplete. I think, we need to examine participation, capability, access, voice, mobility, competitiveness and the ability to continue creating value after a programme or partnership ends.
Discussion proposed: Are people only receiving value, or are they becoming better able to create, negotiate and retain it?

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Q2: Businesses can do this by integrating social value into the business model, rather than treating it as a separate CSR activity. When CSR sits mainly within communications or marketing, there is a risk that impact becomes a message about the business rather than a choice shaping how the business operates.

The starting point should remain as primarily a real customer or market need. Businesses can then work with existing local capabilities, knowledge and providers while reducing barriers to market participation. These may include limited access, weak market information, unsuitable products or communication, cultural misunderstanding and fragmented relationships between different actors.

This can create mutual value. Customers receive products and services that are more relevant to their needs. Local providers gain fairer market access, stronger capabilities and opportunities for repeat business. Companies gain local knowledge, trust, more reliable relationships and a stronger operating environment.

From a pragmatic business perspective, this can open new customer segments, improve supplier reliability, strengthen local legitimacy and reduce market friction. The strongest social value is created when improving people’s participation in the economy also improves how the business performs.
Discussion proposed: How can companies move social value from a communications function into the way they create and sustain commercial value?

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@Tsegga Medhin, President of the Pearl Leadership Institute, emailed us her contribution, and I am sharing it here:

"When you ask about shared prosperity beyond growth or income, I have one answer: intentional leadership and ownership.GDP measures if the pie got bigger. SDG 10 measures if the bottom 40% got a slice.

Intentional leadership measures who owns the bakery.

As an invited speaker by UN SDG stakeholders meeting in 2015, I shared: we don’t have a jobs crisis. We have an ownership gap. And we don’t close it with beneficiaries. We close it with architects.

At The Pearl Leadership Institute, we’re intentional. We don’t just teach girls STEM. We build architects — moving them from student, to scientist, to shareholder. Because poverty doesn’t end by accident. Shared prosperity only happens by intentional transfer:

  1. Contracts, not charity.
  2. Equity, not just employment.
  3. Deeds, not donations. The UN gave us the SDGs. GDP gave us dashboards. Intentional leadership gives us deed transfers — to the people who will architect what’s next.

So I’ll leave this Business Fights Poverty room with one question for business leaders and all changemakers:
What did we intentionally transfer this quarter besides money? Because resilience, wellbeing, and opportunity don’t trickle down.
People don’t need to be rescued. They need to be resourced as architects.
And ownership has to be handed down. On purpose.
We have an ownership gap."

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Q3: We need partnerships built around workable collaboration, not only shared ambition. A partnership should not be a label attached to procurement, consultation or negotiation. It should be a working arrangement in which different actors contribute distinct value, accept responsibilities and share appropriate risks and benefits.

Businesses can contribute commercial discipline, customers and routes to scale. Governments can provide enabling policies and infrastructure. Investors can provide suitable capital and realistic timeframes. Civil society can contribute local knowledge, trust and accountability. Communities must help define the need, the value being created and whether the proposed approach works in practice.

Bringing these actors together is still not enough. They often use different professional languages, follow different timelines and have different incentives and definitions of value. Someone must therefore own the coordination and alignment work, without controlling every party, and translate shared ambition into practical working arrangements.

Those outside, yet involved, arrangements should clarify roles, contributions, decision-making, risks, rewards, recognition, information sharing and what happens when circumstances change. Partnerships should begin with manageable pilots, document what works, correct what does not and expand only when there is credible evidence.

I think partnerships often fail not because ambition is missing, but because the working arrangements underneath it remain vague.
Discussion proposed: Who should resource the coordination and alignment work that everyone needs, but nobody usually owns?

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Hello everyone,

I am Dr. Willis Ochieng. I am the Executive Director of Creats International, a nonprofit organization that dismantles the social, cultural, and economic barriers that hold marginalized communities back from thriving. We build the capacity of communities and link them to critical resources like seeds, fertilizer, clean water, clean cooking energy, finance, and markets. More information: www.thecreats.org

As a grassroots organization with a local footprint, we strongly affirm and support the need to move beyond GDP. If you read or listen to economists, their estimates (based merely on GDP), Africa is rising! However, the situation on the ground is different. Take food security, for instance. One out of nine people globally goes to bed hungry. However, in Africa, the picture is very bleak. One out of four people is hungry! This is despite all the economic growth across the continent (I am generalizing my argument while being cognizant of the heterogeneity of the continent).

Building shared prosperity requires building functional institutions (from village-level groups to national institutions). These institutions, especially local institutions, can serve as conduits for information, resources, and policy advocacy, such as climate action.

The second ingredient for a shared prosperity is investments in inclusive financing mechanisms that can propel rural communities to produce. Many investments in rural financing mechanisms, for instance, MFIs, have since prioritized profits over people. However, we need to recalibrate what we invest in and how we measure progress. This means that we have to adjust our monitoring and evaluation metrics to go beyond economics. For instance, we have to incorporate monitoring and evaluation systems that account for the mental and emotional impacts of our interventions. What is not measured cannot always, cannot be improved. We need gender disaggregated data that tells the whole story.

Third, we need to invest in developing the human capacity of communities. People need to have the tools to adjust to the impacts of climate change or Artificial Intelligence, for example. This means building the necessary hardware and software that will catapult communities from simply surviving to thriving. Our education systems and curricula must change to represent the new socio-economic and cultural nuances we are dealing with.