Bridge 5: Strengthening Cross-Sector Collaboration

Partnerships
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Bridge 5
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Background

The world is at a critical turning point. With the 2030 deadline for the Global Goals fast approaching, there is a growing urgency to surface bold ideas, practical examples, and collective action that can accelerate progress. As part of our journey towards the Global Goals Summit in September, we are launching a series of community sessions. The community session will take place in the morning and afternoon on the 21st of May and on the 16th of July, followed by a final reflective session during the Global Goals Summit.

Tackling complex global challenges requires businesses to collaborate across industries, with policymakers, and with civil society. This bridge enables companies to maximise their impact on the issues most material to their operations while leveraging the expertise, resources, and networks of others, ensuring collective action drives systemic change beyond what any one organisation can achieve alone.

The sessions were online, but also hybrid in selected locations thanks to the following Business Fights Poverty Impact Partners hosting their stakeholders to join the discussion:

Amref in Nairobi
Child Fund in Bengaluru
Cotton Connect in New Delhi
iDE Global in Dhaka

The session combined written contributions, real-time discussion, and community-led insights.

Read more on Five Bridges themes from the Business Fights Poverty framework.

Panel

VIEW Full List of Named Contributors

Questions

  1. What’s a powerful example of cross-sector collaboration you’ve been part of or witnessed—and what made it work?
  2. What do you think holds companies back from deeper, more meaningful collaboration with other businesses, foundations, civil society or government?
  3. How can partnerships move beyond short-term projects to create long-term systemic change?

How to add your comments

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Dear Members of the Poverty Alleviation Forum,

Warm greetings to you all,

It is with great pleasure that I extend my heartfelt thanks and appreciation for your participation in this vital forum, which serves as a key platform for exchanging ideas and working together to confront one of the most pressing challenges in our region—poverty.

My name is Abdulwahab Mohammed, General Director of the Middle East Forum for Development and Peacebuilding, and Head of the Youth Situation Chapter in Yemen. I am honored to be among you today to contribute to this collective effort toward building a more just and dignified future for all.

Yemen is currently facing a complex humanitarian crisis as a result of years of conflict and war, with youth bearing the brunt of its consequences. The war has led to the deterioration of education and employment opportunities, widespread unemployment, and economic and social instability—all of which have deepened poverty levels among young people and deprived them of their basic right to a decent life.

There is an urgent need for a systematic shift in how we address this issue, by adopting effective programs for economic empowerment, enhancing the entrepreneurial ecosystem, enabling youth access to resources, building their skills, and creating real opportunities for them to contribute to development.

In this regard, I would like to propose the following key recommendations:

  1. Launch vocational and entrepreneurial training programs tailored to local market needs and capable of providing sustainable job opportunities.

  2. Provide financial incentives and promote partnerships with the private sector to support youth-led small and medium enterprises.

  3. Support social and technological innovation as a means of addressing community challenges through youth-driven solutions.

  4. Enhance access to finance through simplified mechanisms and crowdfunding platforms.

  5. Engage youth in decision-making processes related to economic and development policies in the country.

I truly believe this forum offers a valuable opportunity to build a strong support network and exchange best practices across sectors in order to chart a clear roadmap for combating poverty and empowering future generations.

I welcome your feedback and ideas and look forward to productive dialogue and meaningful collaboration.

With sincere regards,
Abdulwahab Mohammed
General Director, Middle East Forum for Development and Peacebuilding
Head of the Youth Situation Chapter – Yemen

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‘There is a greater need for strong, mutually beneficial partnerships among stakeholders, including government entities, the private sector, foundations, development partners, and local communities. Such collaborations are essential for enhancing resource leverage and ensuring that benefits are effectively shared. This can help achieve long-term systemic change and create sustainable, equitable impacts, as we all envision for the future’ .

I look forward to sharing and learning about best practices while exploring more effective partnership models in future engagements

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I am very excited about this particular topic.

Cross-sector collaboration matters now more than ever because we have less resources to address more complex challenges. Systems don’t pause when institutions break down. In an era where public trust is eroding and politics are increasingly gridlocked, cross-sector collaboration becomes the connective tissue for progress. It’s a strategic operating model for how we solve problems that no one actor can fix alone. When business, government, and civil society are aligned around contribution, they can co-create solutions that are locally driven, financially viable, and socially durable.

We often think collaboration fills the gaps where government falls short. But my own experience suggests that it builds new systems of trust, accountability, and innovation that are more adaptive to real-world complexity.

A powerful lesson I learned to make cross-sector collaboration work effectively is to start with shared listening. This shared problem-framing repositions every actor as co-owners of the solution and when you create that kind of alignment early, the solutions that follow are not more inclusive, innovative, and resilient.

I will share more on this, but one moment that stays with me was co-creating a logistics system for smallholder markets in Northern Mozambique, connecting a wholesale input supplier, a logistics provider, and a group of youth-led, last-mile entrepreneurs. No one actor had the whole solution, but the system did. We just needed the right conditions for that system to emerge.

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What holds companies back from deeper, more meaningful collaboration with other businesses, foundations, civil society, or government?

From my experience, one of the biggest barriers is the lack of trust and fair engagement in partnerships. Some organizations prioritize self-interest over true collaboration whether by imposing one-sided agreements, taking undue credit, or even co-opting ideas without fair recognition.

For instance, I’ve seen cases where an initial discussion about a joint initiative leads to one party exploiting the other’s contributions, either by drafting unfair MOUs or sidelining the original contributors. This not only discourages future collaboration but also fosters a competitive rather than cooperative mindset. Without transparency, mutual respect, and clear accountability, organizations miss out on the full potential of meaningful partnerships.

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:waving_hand: Hello everyone! I’m Maya Middlemiss, joining from Valencia, Spain—where I’m co-founder of the Remote Resilience Hub initiative.

With a background in remote work strategy and communication, I’ve spent 25 years working from anywhere, and the last 8 helping others do the same through my platform Remote Work Europe. Most recently, I’m focused on how we make remote working actually work, not just for well-resourced individuals and employers, but in ways that build more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable communities.

Our RRH pilot emerged from a cross-sector collaboration following recent local crises (flooding, blackouts) that exposed how unprepared even ‘smart cities’ can be when digital infrastructure fails. We’re now building tools and partnerships to help remote workers, local employers, and policymakers co-create better systems together.

I’m here to listen, learn, and explore how models like ours might be adapted or improved through shared insight, especially from those working in far more complex or under-resourced environments.

Looking forward to the event next week, and glad to connect in advance via https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmiddlemiss/

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One of the most powerful examples of cross-sector collaboration I’ve led is Project ExtraCover, an innovative digital health insurance initiative in Bangladesh. This project brings together a diverse set of partners: World Vision Bangladesh (civil society), VisionFund International (microfinance), Milvik (BIMA)—a Swedish-origin insurtech (private sector), and now actively engaging bKash and BRAC Bank (fintech and banking) to introduce a nano-savings mechanism for continuity of care.

What made this collaboration work was the shared commitment to solving a deeply entrenched problem—out-of-pocket health expenses among vulnerable families—combined with each partner bringing their distinct strengths to the table.

  • World Vision contributed deep community trust and outreach among the most underserved.
  • Milvik brought in a ready-to-scale digital health platform combining insurance, telemedicine, and chronic disease management.
  • VisionFund provided financial inclusion insights and community financing models.
  • bKash and BRAC Bank are now helping us co-design a savings-linked payment solution to transition families from subsidies to self-sustaining contributions.

In just a few months, the project has facilitated over 1,600 teleconsultations, processed 81 hospital claims, and helped families save over $5,000 in medical costs—with 85% of users being women. The impact is not just in the numbers, but in shifting community behavior towards preventive health and dignified financial planning.

What made it work was:

  • A systems-thinking approach, where each actor contributed to a part of the solution.
  • An adaptive design, where feedback loops from field data, financial behaviors, and service usage informed rapid improvements.
  • And perhaps most importantly, a shared narrative that aligned public benefit with private incentives and development goals.

To me, this is what meaningful cross-sector collaboration looks like—building something no one actor could achieve alone, but together, it changes lives.

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After years of working across public, private, nonprofit, and startup ecosystems, I’ve seen that cross-sector collaboration often stumbles not because of differing objectives, but because of unspoken cultural mismatches.

I’ve led numerous collective intelligence workshops rooted in the Collective Impact Framework, bringing diverse actors together to co-design solutions. What becomes clear quickly is that while sectors may align on “what” to solve, they often diverge on the “how.”

Practices, language, tools, even meeting styles vary drastically. A government partner wants roadmaps and KPIs; a startup wants agility and live testing; a civil society actor wants community validation first. Add generational layers, Boomers emailing PDFs, Gen Z sharing TikToks, and it gets even more fragmented.
Yhis cultural complexity is unfortunately rarely named, let alone addressed. That’s the blind spot.

The most impactful collaborations I’ve witnessed succeeded because they started not with tasks, but with identifying a shared language, a human-centered entry point where everyone feels heard and understood before co-design even begins. And just as importantly, they empowered partnership champions: It’s the people who quietly but skillfully navigated the cultural terrain, bridging communication gaps, balancing expectations, and aligning stakeholders without forcing uniformity. All from within!

What truly moves partnerships from short-term pilots to long-term systemic change is this subtle work of alignment across cultures, not just sectors. It’s shared problem-framing early on, flexible structures that evolve with feedback, and a design that balances public value with private incentive. Without these, even the most well-funded collaborations risk becoming siloed, short-lived efforts.

Sustainable project development across different sectors isn’t just about bringing sectors together, it’s about creating the conditions for them to truly understand one another. This is actually a sector-agnostic reality for me!

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What’s a powerful example of cross-sector collaboration you’ve been part of or witnessed—and what made it work?

A powerful example of cross-sector collaboration we at the Predistribution Initiative (PDI) are proud to be part of is the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD). Launched in September 2024, the TISFD brings together more than 20 founding organizations across the private, public, and social sectors to co-create a global framework for understanding and disclosing how business and financial institutions impact and depend on people.

TISFD’s aim is to incentivize business and financial practices that create fairer, stronger societies and economies. PDI is one of the founding partners, and we are proud to have helped shape the initiative’s vision and structure from the beginning.

What has and continues to make this collaboration successful is its multi-stakeholder, co-creative engagement and governance processes, which integrate perspectives from civil society, labor unions, business, and financial actors globally. This diverse and inclusive governance structure fosters trust, aligns incentives, and enables shared ownership of the outputs.

By aligning around a shared understanding of systemic risks and long-term value creation, the TISFD demonstrates how diverse stakeholders can work together to build the tools needed to embed social equity at the core of financial and business decision-making—ultimately bridging the gap between financial disclosures and social outcomes.

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What do you think holds companies back from deeper, more meaningful collaboration with other businesses, foundations, civil society or government?

Many companies, especially the ones responding to shareholders interests, are held back from engaging in deeper collaboration due to a prevailing mindset rooted in financial short-termism and siloed metrics of success. Today’s economy is highly financialized, where investment mandates often prioritize short-term returns over long-term wellbeing of people and the planet. This mindset undervalues social and environmental capital and overlooks the systemic risks emerging from inequality, climate change, and eroding trust in institutions.

As PDI has explored through our collaboration with Earth4All, The Club of Rome Africa investor, and Beyond Bretton Woods in the paper “Investing to reconnect financial value with people, nature and the real economy: an iterative blueprint for capital markets actors, policymakers and regulators”, these misaligned incentives often prevent businesses and investors from seeing collaboration as both a strategic necessity and a opportunity. Without a shared understanding of systemic risk and the role of each sector in shaping outcomes, companies struggle to justify cross-sector partnerships within their existing business models and internal governance structures.

Moreover, the disconnect between core business functions—such as finance or procurement—and social or environmental teams further fragment priorities. As Zahid Torres-Rahman, Business Fight Poverty Co-Founder points out in “Five Bridges to 2045: How Business Can Deliver a Fairer, More Resilient World”, companies need to bridge these internal silos to embed social impact into the heart of decision-making.

To move forward, companies must expand their perception of value and risk to account for human, social, and natural capital—and recognize that long-term resilience requires collaborative solutions that no single actor can develop in isolation.

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Hi there, looking forward to connecting with you all on the 16 July. Really interesting to read these thoughts and responses to the questions. I’ll be joining as one of the contributors and would be interested to connect with other cross-sector collaborators for positive change: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-carboni/

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Shweta Verma - Director Programme Management Lead - CottonConnect
Introduction
Joined CottonConnect in 2018

With 16 years of experience, Shweta leads global farm-to-fashion programmes focused on sustainable agriculture and ethical supply chains across geography. She specializes in strategy, implementation, and multi-country operations that deliver ESG impact and improve farmer livelihoods through:

Sustainable Supply Chain
Program Design & strategy
Stakeholder Engagement (Brands, NGOs, Govt)
Reporting, Budgeting & Risk Management
Team Development & Capacity Building

Know her better:

Proud pet parent to Phoebe, my joyful and spirited companion.
I turn to painting as a creative way to reflect and recharge.
Passionate about reading especially spirituality, human behaviour, and culture.
Love traveling to explore new places, people, and perspectives.

Connect with me at my LinkedIn profile

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Hello, I am Hannah Clark- the Farmers’ Voice Radio Development Manager at the Lorna Young Foundation. I look forward to this discussion and connecting with you all.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-clark-0bab4b6b

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Thank you for the opportunity
Answer 1
Cross sector collaboration is very powerful and essential for todays world.
One powerful example has been CottonConnect’s work on the Sustainable Cotton projects that bring together entire stakeholders, despite occurrence of geo-political situation among different countries. For instance, in Bangladesh and India, we have enabled collaboration between brands, local NGOs and government bodies working towards the shared vision help building mutual accountability and trust for the betterment of farmers.

Answer 2
Most often organizations are scared of losing control resulting to major risk. There should be opportunity giver to each stakeholder to take on respective responsibilities with share goals and outcomes and appreciate the effort of farmers and implementing partners and be open for learnings.

Answer 3
Short terms projects will not bring long term solution, the resource are being consumed at greater scale every year. At CottonConnect, the shift has been seen through co-invest put in overall solutions and not just in farmer training but in capacity building of local partners, supply chain traceability tools, or regenerative models that outlive funding cycles. Long-term change comes when collaboration is not treated as social responsibility or compliance but as a core part of business.

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An inclusive hiring program in Latin America for Afro-Descendants, which was first launched in 2022 first in Colombia and later in Brazil. These initiatives were partnerships with IFC and local organizations, such as Manos Visibles (Colombia) and the Black Economists Network (Brazil). They enable IFC to advance social and economic inclusion, which is at the core of the World Bank Group’s focus on job creation.

Initiatives like this are necessary because even though one out of every four Latin Americans is of African descent, Afro-descendants’ career opportunities are extremely limited, says Bruno Gomes, co-founder of the Network of Black Economists of Brazil (Rede de Economistas Pretas e Pretos, or REPP), an IFC partner. Afro-descendants in Latin America, are 2.5 times more likely than other Latin Americans to live in conditions of chronic poverty, according to the World Bank. One in five students drops out of primary school. However, even with the same level of education and experience, they earn less than their non-Afro-descendant counterparts for the same type of work in all countries across Latin America.

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Looking forward to the conversation tomorrow and hearing others’ experience. I started working with nonprofits (for 12 years) before moving to working in-house in a corporate foundation and now I consult with companies on their impact, so I’ve seen it from different angles - and understand what some of the obstacles are for companies to collaborate more with other sectors. One of the features in recent years has been the regulatory / legislative requirement for companies around ‘ESG’ and the reporting they need to do. I often think they’re being asked to quantify their impact in a way that many nonprofit organisations don’t!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelkelly-pwp-esgx/

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Excited to connect with everyone on July 16! It has been fascinating reading your insights on the discussion questions. As one of the contributors, I am looking forward to engaging with fellow cross-sector collaborators , let us connect and explore opportunities to work together!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wangari-mwangi-91a503303/

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Hi all, I’m Nidhi Gupta, Director – Programme Management (Global Accounts) at CottonConnect.

With over two decades of experience across project management, strategic marketing, branding, and communications, I’ve consistently focused on driving visibility, engagement, and impactful outcomes.

I look forward to connecting and contributing to making a change. LinkedIn profile

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Hello everyone, Marc Schleifer here, independent consultant with 25 years in the international development sector from the non-profit side. Looking forward to meeting tomorrow for this discussion. Please feel free to connect: (23) Marc Schleifer | LinkedIn

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  1. What’s a powerful example of cross-sector collaboration you’ve been part of or witnessed—and what made it work?
    An example of cross-sector collaboration I’ve witnessed is the Sanitation Market System Project in Bangladesh. In this initiative, iDE brought together government, private manufacturers, development partners, and rural sanitation entrepreneurs to scale access to hygienic sanitation. What made it work was the alignment of incentives: the government was focused on public health outcomes, manufacturers sought market growth, and entrepreneurs wanted to build viable businesses. iDE’s role was to bridge these actors—strengthening supply chains, supporting policy advocacy, and driving demand through behavior change communication. The result was over 1 million household gaining access to improved sanitation—not through giveaways, but through market-based solutions that can sustain long after the project ends. Cross-Sector alignment around shared goals is one of the reasons why it worked.

  2. How can partnerships move beyond short-term projects to create long-term systemic change?

To achieve long-term systemic change, all partners must first acknowledge the scale of effort, resources, time, and complexity involved. Systems change doesn’t happen in a single funding cycle—it requires sustained commitment, local ownership, and a willingness to adapt.

In fact, there is often greater risk in initiatives that claim to deliver systemic change without truly investing in or understanding what it takes—including the structural barriers, power dynamics, and institutional shifts required. These efforts may generate short-term visibility but can create disillusionment or even harm when they fail to deliver lasting impact.

By contrast, partnerships grounded in realistic expectations, shared learning, and co-investment—even if they don’t brand themselves as “transformational”—often lay the strongest foundation for long-term change. Moving beyond short-termism requires:

Clarity on systemic goals and pathways for change
Flexible funding models that allow for iteration
Deep engagement with local actors and institutions
Joint accountability across sectors for both results and risks

Systemic change is not a product—it’s a process. And partnerships that are honest about that process are far more likely to achieve meaningful, lasting outcomes.

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