Reimagining impact investing to catalyze nonprofit sustainability and resilience in the Global South

Stark gender inequalities greatly impact women’s and girls’ ability to access vital social and health services, especially those most vulnerable and particularly in the Global South. While governments roll out programs to reach underserved groups, efforts are oftentimes inefficient, lack quality, and ultimately perpetuate or exacerbate inequalities. The private sector, on the other hand—including large companies and promising startups—typically offers innovative and high-quality solutions, but these rarely target the most marginalized individuals. Local NGOs and CSOs have played an instrumental role in helping to close these major gaps but have been largely funded by fragile and unstable sources of income including philanthropy and international aid. These can abruptly change in the face of shifting macroeconomic contexts and political positions, evidenced by the recent dismantling of USAID and forthcoming decreases to other governmental funding. Funding fragility is even more acute for politicized and already underfunded areas at the intersection of gender and health.

Global organizations in specific regions and fields have decades of experience navigating sudden stops to international aid and multilateral funding. Since the early 2000s, many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) were ‘graduated’ to middle- or upper-middle-income status by international cooperation agencies, significantly diminishing incoming resources despite ongoing needs and inequities. Additionally, providers of Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America have had to contend with the effects of the Mexico City Policy—also known as the Global Gag Rule—which has come into and out of effect since 1985, mandating a halt to U.S. health funding for NGOs that provide legal abortion services or referrals, which also means abruptly suspending other key areas of work including access to contraception. This funding instability has prompted many NGOs and CSOs to anchor their strategies in financial sustainability and resilience, prioritizing income diversification including advancing locally earned income models, to reduce reliance on uncertain sources of foreign aid funding and to consolidate financial autonomy that helps ensure continuity of their work.

While philanthropic funding—largely from institutional foundations—has been a key enabler for many socially-minded organizations in the Global South, this type of funding is also limited and cannot be the sole source of revenue on which NGOs and CSOs rely to operate, continue, sustain, and grow their work.

With the backdrop of this context, this fireside chat session will first include a moderated discussion among two leaders in international sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) who have first-hand experience cultivating and driving locally-adapted social enterprise models through incubation and investment programs for grassroots nonprofits, which help consolidate institutional financial stability and sustainability, while still reaching the most vulnerable with critical and innovative health services which are typically underfunded in their local contexts.

Giselle Carino, CEO of Fòs Feminista, will share the organizations’ experience in funding, amplifying and strengthening the capacity of its alliance of 220 local NGO and grassroots feminist partners in 40 countries in the Global South. Through its Innovation & Social Enterprise Lab, Fòs Feminista collaborates with partners to design, test, and invest in high-impact, revenue-generating initiatives that expand access to SRH care and channel resources back into organizations to fuel long-term impact. Through the Lab, Fòs Feminista coaches grassroots organizations in: generating income diversification through social enterprise; developing and testing innovative SRH service models; and becoming investment-ready to receive repayable capital to scale solutions. Lab participants become part of a pipeline to receive low-interest loans to finance their social enterprise models’ scale-up through our Feminist Impact Fund. To address women’s lack of access to contraception, menstrual and other reproductive health products, Fòs Feminista and four partners created Innova Health Supplies, a social enterprise that delivers high-quality, low-cost products and medicines to governments and organizations in 23 countries.

Odette Heckster, Managing Director of PSI-Europe, will share PSI’s work adapting private sector collaborations and social marketing solutions to nonprofits, especially in Asia and Africa. PSI-Europe builds support for under-invested health issues to bridge the health equity gap through PSI’s extensive network of 8,000 local staff and partner organizations in over 40 countries in the Global South. PSI-Europe generates evidence on shortcomings in SRH programming and financing and builds capacity in maternal and child health market research and market creation for sexual and reproductive health services and products across partner organizations, research institutes, companies, and government donors.

Following the discussion of these “case studies” within the field of sexual and reproductive health, we will facilitate an interactive “marketplace” activity in which participants and speakers identify how access to catalytic capital can address some of the most pressing sustainability challenges facing nonprofits globally, followed by discussions in small groups to extrapolate lessons from what was discussed more broadly to the nonprofit field throughout the Global South and beyond and identify solutions moving forward. These participatory discussions will aim to crowdsource new ideas, learnings, and lessons about how to catalyze sustainability and growth, and identify potential income diversification and investments for the nonprofit sector as it continues to fill key access gaps to address essential needs of vulnerable populations—particularly in the Global South.