Photo by Yan Krukau from Pexels
By Aly Rahim, Programme Manager, CIVIC: The Civil Society and Social Innovation Alliance & Global Partnership for Social Accountability / Global Lead for Citizen Engagement, World Bank
Disease outbreaks, droughts and wildfires, escalating conflicts, and disruptive technologies that exacerbate inequalities – these were just some of the crises we witnessed this summer. The compounding nature of these shocks makes one thing clear: development actors must find smarter, more inclusive ways to collaborate if increasingly scarce resources are to be put to best use. Collaboration, however, is not just about funding. It must extend to equitable partnerships with the communities we aspire to serve, empowering them as co-creators and agents of their own development.
Catalytic partnerships need redefinition; one where philanthropy and development finance institutions (DFIs), like the World Bank, combine forces to support and elevate communities, interlinked with public policy systems. A new programme called CIVIC, announced by the World Bank less than a year ago, might offer one such window of opportunity for collectively supporting civil society and enabling the environment for community-driven solutions and innovations to deliver sustainable impact.
Focusing on the Enabling Environment
Partnering with civil society is critical when it comes to establishing and fostering the necessary enabling environment for social innovations to surface and effective development to take place. Historically, this task of supporting civil society and incubating innovations had fallen to philanthropic foundations, while DFIs focused on large-scale government partnerships and national policy reforms. However, philanthropy can’t be expected to support this enabling environment on its own – it must be linked to broader public systems, policies, and institutions. This is where DFIs, which are especially well-positioned to play such a bridging role, can come in.
This was underscored in the Bridgespan Group’s recent report, “At Common Cause: How Development Funders and Philanthropy Collaborate in Africa.” The report shows that when interests align, each party can benefit from the strengths of the other: DFIs bring financial power and high-level government and private-sector reach, while philanthropy brings civil society connections and service delivery experience that DFIs might not have—but need—in order to work effectively on the ground.
To do this well, systems strengthening, as opposed to piecemeal grantmaking, is key. In the Bridgespan report Executive Director of WINGS, Benjamin Bellegy shares that, “One of the key things WINGS is trying to push for is to have more investments in building the collaboration infrastructure and ecosystem … [And] this is critical if we want to go beyond a handful of big shiny examples and enable a whole new way of working across the entire philanthropy sector.” This fundamental rethink is now more necessary than ever, especially with official development assistance (ODA) budgets shrinking.
In her Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) article, “An Overlooked Sweet Spot for Foundations: How philanthropic capital can partner with the World Bank,” Leslie Tsai (Chandler Foundation) showcases the value-add of bridging these ecosystems: the World Bank provides financial leverage, government connection, and policy influence while philanthropy enables agile, catalytic financing to activate the ecosystem. Together, they can drive systems-level change – demonstrated in Malawi’s beneficial ownership reform.
In 2022, a philanthropic consortium co-invested $2 million in a World Bank multi-donor trust fund (MDTF), an instrument that the Bank uses to pool funding and expertise from various partners, to bring civil society into the reform process – this investment went far beyond its face value and helped pave the way for an $80 million World Bank package to Malawi. That’s precisely what World Bank MDTFs do: they leverage a dual approach combining strategic, catalytic financing and systems for knowledge sharing and transfer.
The Way Forward
The real potential of DFIs lies not just in the size of their budgets, but in their ability to systematise and scale what works. The Malawi case demonstrates how partnering with the World Bank can achieve change at scale. But how do we ensure that cases like Malawi’s become the norm, rather than the exception? This is what the World Bank’s CIVIC: The Civil Society and Social Innovation Alliance, seeks to address.
A new global programme and multi-donor trust fund announced by President Ajay Banga at last year’s WBG/IMF Annual Meetings, CIVIC will operationalise the Bank’s commitment to deepen its partnership with civil society by creating a dedicated global facility for financing and scaling people-driven solutions, making entry points into impactful partnerships like the one in Malawi easier and more systematic by bringing together foundations, governments, and whole of society actors to support those on the ground.
As Tsai notes in her SSIR article, “[CIVIC] will offer strategic funders and civil society organisations (CSOs) a seat at the table and an opportunity for raising civil society voices and ideas that can sometimes get lost in big institutions.”
Bringing this table together is key – Bridgespan’s report also highlights the value-add of structured collaboration that integrates complementary partner strengths, including technical expertise, influence, and convening power – along with capital – to collectively respond to complex social challenges and create enduring structural change:
“As government-funded development aid budgets shrink and social needs across the globe continue to grow, development funders and philanthropic foundations are taking a fresh look at how they can collaborate to achieve more together. (…) For instance, the World Bank Group, the biggest development aid funder, recently launched CIVIC: The Civil Society and Social Innovation Alliance, to financially support civil society organisations with grants jointly funded by the bank, foundations, and other investors.”
Given the current funding environment and the need to support communities’ backbones – civil society – CIVIC provides an actionable platform for philanthropies to amplify impact and bridge local innovation with multilateral delivery. More than just a funding mechanism, CIVIC is a bridge that links philanthropic capital and civil society insights and innovation with the Bank’s access to public systems, embedding collaborative relationships within World Bank operations.
Through thematic platforms – starting with health, climate, gender, tech/AI, and youth – CIVIC offers a trusted, World Bank-hosted vehicle where funders can:
- Pool resources to support local civil society aligned with country platforms,
- Activate flexible capital to seize windows of opportunity, just like in Malawi, and
- Link social innovation to public systems, leveraging World Bank operations for scale.
CIVIC’s inaugural Health Platform, in partnership with the Global Financing Facility, demonstrates this approach in action, mobilising $15M for CSOs to support high-impact, community-driven innovations while creating the enabling conditions for their integration into formal health systems and World Bank health operations.
And as CIVIC launches and grows, we stand to learn from each other on this journey. Foundations have unique flexibility and risk appetite – qualities that DFIs need to achieve their goals. And, DFIs can lend legitimacy, access to government, and scale to the work of CSOs and social innovators in a way that philanthropies cannot achieve alone. Amidst all of this, partnering with civil society is the most critical piece when it comes to establishing and fostering the necessary enabling environment for impact and social innovations to surface and scale. And the World Bank, especially now through CIVIC, is well-positioned to play such a bridging role.
But doing so requires both funding and a shift in mindset – from project-based giving to systems-level collaboration, from parallel operations to co-creation. We believe CIVIC can support this shift and invite you to collaborate with us on this journey.
Aly Rahim – Programme Manager, CIVIC: The Civil Society and Social Innovation Alliance & Global Partnership for Social Accountability / Global Lead for Citizen Engagement, World Bank
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